Liberians Storm Airport in Plea for U.S. Peace Force

MONROVIA (Reuters) - Hundreds of Liberians chanting "We want peace, no more war" burst onto an airport runway under pouring rain on Wednesday to urge a U.S. military team to send peacekeepers as soon as possible.

Liberian troops kept the crowd away from the U.S. survey team, which is in Monrovia ahead of a possible peacekeeping mission to a war-wrecked West African country founded by freed American slaves over 150 years ago.

President Bush, on an African tour, has promised to work with the United Nations and African countries for peace Liberia, but he has not yet decided whether to send peacekeepers.

Liberians hope he will send soldiers to save them from hardened fighters on all sides who casually kill, rape and loot. Rebels control some 60 percent of the country of three million after nearly 14 years of violence.

"We want Bush," chanted some of the Liberians who surged out in impromptu demonstrations wherever the U.S. team stopped.

Bush has told President Charles Taylor to quit as a first step to peace, but the former warlord has warned of chaos if he steps down before peacekeepers arrive. Taylor has already accepted a Nigerian asylum offer.

Bush reiterated his position on Wednesday after talks in South Africa with President Thabo Mbeki, saying: "(Mbeki) asked whether or not we'd be involved and I said 'yes, we'll be involved'. We're now determining the extent of our involvement."

Mbeki told the joint news conference: "The United States will cooperate with the African troops, so we are not saying that this is a burden that just falls on the United States. It really ought to principally fall on us as Africans. Of course we need a lot of support."

The 32-strong U.S. survey team, including Marine security, had an easier day than on Wednesday, when it was turned back by forces loyal to Taylor -- who is accused of fueling war in West Africa and wanted by a war crimes court in Sierra Leone.

After visiting camps for thousands of displaced people, the survey team changed civilian clothes for combat fatigues and set off to look at strategic points like the port and airports.

"We're just seeing what's here. It may be military but it may be for something else," said U.S. Navy Captain Roger Coldiron at the James Spriggs-Payne airport in the middle of the capital, currently used for mainly military flights.

West African countries have pledged 3,000 troops to keep a cease-fire and want U.S. forces to help bring that up to 6,000. U.N. officials said a cease-fire monitoring team would start work on Wednesday from its base in Sierra Leone.

But Washington well remembers a bloody retreat from Somalia a decade ago after a humanitarian intervention went awry.

Taylor told CNN that Liberia, with its strong ties to the United States, would be insulted by any comparison with Somalia.

"Everything here is American, everything, everything. We are educated in America... I have my nephews in the Marines and everything. We can never be anti-American. So Somalia -- don't even mention it," he said.

Taylor said on Tuesday he would not necessarily have to wait for U.S. troops to get to Monrovia to hand over power and could leave if a West African force arrived.

But no clear timetable has been set yet and quarrelling over a transition government is heating up.

Taylor's negotiators at talks in Ghana said they had proposed that Vice-President Moses Blah take over when Taylor goes and that elections be held as planned in October, but the main LURD rebel faction said that was preposterous.

The rebel group, which has said its sole aim was to get rid of Taylor, made clear it would like the chance to lead the government.

For your consideration, two pieces (admittedly, from the left wing Guardian UK).

The Elected Dictator, Charles Taylor:

Liberia's head of state, Charles Taylor, has given his unwavering support to rebel leader Foday Sankoh in neighbouring Sierra Leone during the violent civil war, and is himself no stranger to bloodshed, writes Derek Brown
Wednesday May 17, 2000
Liberia is the oldest black African republic, with the longest history of corruption, exploitation and brutal repression. Its current head of state, Ghankay Charles MacArthur Dapkana Taylor, is the latest of a long line of utterly ruthless rulers. He is also the principal sponsor of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
Sankoh learned his trade from a good teacher. Taylor was just one of a clutch of rival warlords who reduced Liberia to a bloody pulp in the 1990s. That he emerged victorious is a tribute to his ruthless ambition.
Liberia, established as a United States colony to be a homeland for freed slaves (Sierra Leone was established by Britain for the same purpose), became independent in 1847. The nascent state was dominated by the small minority of Afro-American settlers who held almost total power until 1980, when army master-sergeant Samuel Doe led a bloody coup.
Doe, who arbitrarily executed most of the ancient regime and any subsequent potential rivals, recruited Charles Taylor to his ramshackle administration. But Taylor wanted more. He built an extensive network of sponsors and allies in neighbouring countries, such as Libya and even - according to one exiled opponent - in Taiwan. On Christmas Eve 1989 he launched his insurrection.
Almost immediately, his National Patriotic Front movement split into murderous factions, which reduced the tiny country to chaos. In August 1990 Taylor's principal rival, Prince Johnson, snatched Samuel Doe literally from under the noses of the so-called peacekeeping force from other West African countries. The dictator was beaten to a pulp, mutilated and killed, the whole ghastly affair recorded in detail on videotape.
Many hoped that Doe's death would restore order. Instead, it sparked a five-year spiral of hellish tribal and factional violence. In 1995 the Abuja peace accords brought a fragile peace and saw Taylor installed as de facto ruler. He reinforced his position with elections in 1997 which were notionally free and fair, but which were utterly distorted by systematic intimidation.
Taylor, now halfway through a six-year presidential term, maintains an iron grip on power through a brutal armed guard and a small coterie of egregiously corrupt cronies. One of his principal assets is the continuing financial aid from Liberia's long-time ally, the United States. Another is the booming diamond export trade, which has been greatly boosted by the dreadful civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone - a war fomented and fuelled by President Taylor through his protege, Sankoh.

Who is Foday Sankoh?:

On the day that British paratroopers captured the leader of the Revolutionary United Front, Derek Brown asks how Foday Sankoh came to lead the rebel forces in Sierra Leone
He is an improbable politician, let alone national leader. But even Foday Sankoh's enemies acknowledge that the leader of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) has rabble-rousing charisma.
A former army corporal and television cameraman, Sankoh was a student leader in the 1970s. Briefly imprisoned for his firebrand politicking, he later joined a group of exiles in Libya, where Muamar Gadafy was eagerly spreading his crackpot revolutionary ideas among West African dissidents.
Sankoh's stepping stone back to Sierra Leone was the neighbouring republic of Liberia, where he formed a close alliance with ruthless rebel chief Charles Taylor, who seized the presidency in 1998 after an appalling eight-year campaign of terror.
Sponsored by Taylor, Sankoh set up his RUF and launched his own insurrection in 1991. Initially fuelled by violent rhetoric against the corruption of the Freetown elite, revolutionary fervour soon degenerated into bloodlust and greed for control of the nation's only significant source of wealth: the diamond mines in the east.
The RUF imposed its will in the interior of the impoverished country with systematic barbarity. Its ragtag forces, including a high proportion of press-ganged and brutalised children, became notorious for abduction, gang rape and summary execution. Its speciality was hacking off the limbs of children. In a land with chronic food shortages, the RUF is also said to have practised cannibalism.
Sankoh's response to criticism has always taken two forms. He blandly denies atrocities and, when possible, puts to death his critics. Two of his early Libyan-trained comrades, Abu Kanu and Rashid Mansaray, were summarily executed after they tried to moderate the excesses of the RUF.
As the welter of blood spread, events in the capital, Freetown, added to the misery of Sierra Leone. In 1992, a young army captain, Valentine Strasser, seized power and clung to it with the aid of a motley group of white mercenaries, who were promised a generous share of the country's diamond wealth in return for restoring order.
Charles Taylor, the Liberian warlord, had other ideas. He gave liberal aid to the RUF to keep Sierra Leone in turmoil, while Liberia's own diamond exports - under Taylor's control - steadily mounted.
A ray of hope shone when Ahmed Tejan Kabbah was democratically elected president, with the backing of Nigeria and other West African allies, which formed a regional peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG. But Kabbah was deposed in 1997 in another military coup led by Colonel Johnny Paul Koroma.
The following year ECOMOG forces reinstalled President Kabbah. The civil war went on, with the West African force lined alongside Sierra Leone's pathetic army and the even weirder militia known as the Kamajors, against the ousted Koroma military junta and the RUF.
Last year brought a fragile truce. Sankoh, reported to have found a new faith in God, had been captured and sentenced to death. Instead, he was offered a place in a coalition government - with control of the diamond mines. The United Nations assembled a new peacekeeping force, and the RUF fighters, along with the other disparate groups of militia brigands, were supposed to integrate with the national army.
That pipedream has now evaporated with the RUF's capture of several hundred UN soldiers and the savage new eruption of fighting in the interior. Most of the warriors scrabbling in the wreckage of Sierra Leone are untrained, undisciplined and unhinged by drugs and drink.
Sankoh's capture is unlikely, in the short term, to affect the dire situation of a country which has, in any meaningful sense of the word, ceased to exist. At least 50,000 Sierra Leoneans have died since the RUF launched its bloody campaign. Up to a quarter of a million are believed to have fled into exile. The death rate from starvation is around 100 a day, and for the survivors, life is filled with terror and misery.

One more. Charles Taylor Defends Sankoh [emphasis mine]:

Not many individuals emerge from the gallows and become vice presidents in charge of diamonds. But Sierra Leone's ruthless rebel veteran Foday Sankoh, whose trademark for political power includes amputating limbs of babies, is not one of the few, and there is every indication that his political fortunes are just beginning. Trusted ally and backer Charles Taylor, President of neighboring Liberia, reacting to world-wide condemnation of the rebels for the havoc they have caused in ten years - with over 50,000 dead, has challenged the RUF critics: "He who's without sin must cast the first stone", he told CNN in a telephone interview, thus endorsing Rev Jackson's judgment on the conflict that "every side has blood on their hands" in not only the RUF, a group referred to by his fellow American US UN Representative Richard Holbrooke as "bunch of rag-tag machete wielding murders."
Angers continue to flare in Sierra Leone against Sankoh, and his fate remains uncertain, with officials vowing to relegate him to the background in future dealings with the RUF. The rebel chief himself told captors he had been robbed of his powers by his "enemies", Sam Bockarie Masquita, who now forms part of Taylor's security machine and lives within the confines of the former warlord as a key strategist. "I am already disgraced. Don't kill me", begged a man noted for "soft commands", says Time, is taking life and hacking limbs of his victims, over 50,000 of them. Sierra Leone's Information Minister, Dr. Julius Spencer, has vowed that the RUF "Must leave the country or be thrown out. They are in a weak position".
Meanwhile, Taylor remains adamant over rehabilitation and leadership role: speaking to like-minded Libyan journalists in Monrovia Taylor insisted that, "He (Sankoh) is not just a piece of paper that must be put in the wind and expected to go away. All parties must be satisfied", the Los Angeles Times quoted Taylor as declaring. The former warlord, himself accused of spearheading the killing of over 250,000 people including 45,000 children, compared Sankoh to the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat, just as the Rev. Jesse Jackson compared Sankoh with Nelson Mandela. Says Taylor in defense of his Libyan trained comrade: "years ago, the struggle of the PLO was considered terrorist and our brother Yasser Arafat was supposed to be a terrorist. Now he is eating at the White House and at Number 10 Downing Street, which [means] people's minds can change."
Indeed people's minds do change, as evident by Taylor's own success in using terror for political dividends, which earned him admiration, and praises from civil right leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Soon, Sankoh could be dinning with Blair, just as Taylor dined with Mandela while receiving honors from French leaders and a peace prize from a German company, Siemens.
So speculations are that Mr. Sankoh may set precedence in bringing West Africa's criminal politicians to trial. Documents found in his home, looted by angry civilians after his hoodlums shot and killed a number of peaceful protesters, provide the basis for charges of corruption, the least among other expected charges such crimes against humanity and gross violation of people's fundamental rights--the right to live and live in happiness. The documents, hand- written is meticulous details, reveal that Sankoh may have stolen and sold diamonds worth over $10 million since he became vice president in charge of the diamonds, according to the BBC. No wonder why disarmament was only a dream since it would have shut the supply line of the diamond fields. The rebel chief also kept details of children abducted for service in his drugged army, according news reports. But Mr. Clinton, along with the UN, and not surprisingly Sankoh's backers in Monrovia, believe the Lome Agreement which allowed him to continue his killings and looting remains a hope for peace, although serious disagreements over the warlord usefulness are emerging from international circles and within Sierra Leone itself.
"Mr. Sankoh's arrest may complicate efforts to secure the release of the hostages by the rebels. But it should now be clear that any attempt to enlist Mr. Sankoh as a partner in peace is doomed to fail. Bringing him to justice is the best way to curb the anarchy that lies at the root of Sierra Leone's agony", say The New York Times in an editorial recently.
Rev. Jesse Jackson earlier announced that Sankoh's "voice was positive" in search for peace, But it should now be clear that any attempt to enlist Mr. Sankoh as a partner in peace is doomed to fail. Bringing him to justice is the best way to curb the anarchy that lies at the root of Sierra Leone's agony", say The New York Times in an editorial recently.
Rev. Jesse Jackson earlier announced that Sankoh's "voice was positive" in search for peace, compared Sankoh's drugged rebels to the ANC of South Africa, and sought a "port of safety" for Mr. Sankoh who was then in hiding. But realizing the resistance from the Sierra Leoneans and the international press, the flippant Reverend has now joined the mantra of isolating the vicious rebel leader. Sankoh should not be allowed to have military edge in Sierra Leone, Rev. Jackson says.
But although Sankoh was arrested by angry Sierra Leoneans and paraded naked in the streets, there are strong indications that his political rise is just beginning. Rev. Jackson's comparison of Sankoh with Mandela may not after all be without reason: The South African President emerged from Robin Island to become President. So Jackson, until recently, may have been preparing us for a President Sankoh. And Taylor, who insisted in 1999 that there would be no military victory against his RUF, condemning the British for training and arming the Sierra Leone's army, is again warning that continued detention of the rebel chief is a "stumbling block in the release of the hostages" his rebels are holding. Asked on CNN about his role in the theft and siphoning of Sierra Leone's diamonds, Taylor made one fascinating revelation: "There are probably more diamonds in Liberia than in Sierra Leone," he countered in the CNN interview. Taylor further informed a believing friend, (the Rev. Jackson who was in Monrovia last week for "peace" in Sierra Leone since he could not visit Freetown) that diamonds do not feature in Liberia's budget because there is no control of over them.
But during the Liberian war, Legbeh Degbon, a geologist responsible for thousands of peasants into the ruthless NPFL, was ordered executed on charges of plotting a coup against Mr. Taylor the warlord. However, the real truth in the man's execution, according to rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) sources, was that the geologist, an expert on the quality of diamonds, committed a sin by questioning Mr. Taylor on the real value of diamonds he (Taylor) was receiving. Taylor dealt directly with diamond vendors who trekked to his bush capital of Gbarnga for purchases. Most of the diamond money was deposited in his Abidjan, Ouagadougou, or European accounts. The geologist's body was dissected and placed in front of the late Samuel Dokie's door in Gbarnga as a reminder that those who questioned Taylor on diamonds or looted proceeds would face the same fate. Both Dokie and the geologist were from the same ethnic group, Gio, who made up the bulk of the NPFL rebels. So yes, diamonds do not feature in Liberia's budget. They go directly to those in charge of the state as their fiefdom. A man believed to benefited from 31 million carats of diamonds smuggled into Liberia called for international financing of his proposal to control diamond mining in West Africa since "there is no organized diamond sales in the region."
Again as in 1999, the Liberian president is insisting on RUF political inclusion (despite recent violations) as precondition for peace. The principal tenants of this seemingly sacrosanct Agreement are: a) Sankoh as Vice President in charge of the diamonds and, b) Disarming his fighters as a prize. So Liberia's interest in the Lome Agreement is understandable when one looks at the personal economic benefits of its political leaders. According to studies, millions of dollars have passed through Liberia in diamond sales.
In any case, the danger in Sierra Leone lies on the political front, and the truth of the matter is that a political settlement in Sierra Leone without RUF's full participation is inconceivable in Taylor's mind for a number of reasons.
1). From the onset of his rebellion in December 1989, Taylor convinced himself that Sierra Leone was his anathema, since Freetown refused him a corridor to launch his offensive and arrested briefly for illegally using the country as base of his operations. Secondly, hundreds of Krahns and Mandingoes (tribes massacred by Taylor's drugged rebels in their hundreds of thousands) fled to Sierra Leone for protection. When Taylor created the RUF and dispatched it to Sierra Leone, their safety was no longer guaranteed. Many of them remain there since the so-called elections and many more have joined them due to continued clampdown by Taylor's security forces.
2). The AFRC-RUF coup of 1997 eliminated this fear because immediately after the takeover, the junta called and congratulated Taylor as the new President of Liberia. Nigeria's military campaign that ousted the junta was bitterly resisted in Monrovia, as thousands of RUF and AFRC fighters sought refuge in Liberia. Taylor demanded that there can be no peace without Sankoh and the RUF. A better- trained, better armed RUF-AFRC force, operating from Liberia, launched its 1999 offensive, coming close to taking Freetown. The world community accepted Taylor's demand that there would be no peace in Sierra Leone without the RUF. The strategy of terror for political dividends worked in Liberia. It would be repeated in Sierra Leone. Through the mediation of efforts of his friend the Rev. Jackson, Taylor drafted the Lome Agreement and forced it down the throat of a cornered government wanting peace at any price, any cost.
Concludes the British weekly The Economist: "If the UN, Britain, America and the Sierra Leone Government all follow the same policy towards Liberia, Mr. Taylor could be taken on. But they are at odds. Liberia, which was founded by black Americans, looks to the US as Sierra Leone looks to Britain, the former colonial ruler. And Mr. Jackson, together with other black Americans who are influential in formulating American policy on Africa, are personal friends of Mr. Taylor's."
It was this personal "friendship" between the butchering and corrupt warlord and America's civil right leaders that equally influenced America's policy towards Liberia during the war, with men like former President Jimmy Carter unashamedly preaching the warlord's cause and therefore ensuring his triumph.
What is now increasingly become accepted is the fact Sierra Leone's woes will continue as long as Liberia remains a corridor for supplying and arming the rebels. Nigeria Chief Staff Gen. Victor Malu, the man who theoretically disarmed Liberia's armed factions but later confided that Taylor was the only warlord that looked "presidential" because his looted wealth, now says that Sierra Leone's will end only when the rebels' supply line, well established in Liberia, is cutoff. Burkina Faso, one of the rebels' main backers along with Libya and to some extent Cote d'Ivoire before the coup, has denied any links to Sankoh, insisting correctly that it has no land borders with Sierra Leone. Its job is only to arrange arms shipment, according to a report in The Washington Post. Since Campaori's 'Comrade-in chaos and death " Taylor has land borders with Sierra Leone, the rest of the job is his. In 1999, the rebels, on the verge of victory after storming Freetown and killing 5000 people, announced that only Campaori, would convince them to stop the killing since, they argued, he understood their war and requests.
Sankoh has survived before, and with Taylor's blessings, and once international attention on the crisis subsides, Sierra Leone will slide back to business as usual. With neighbors like Taylor, West Africa is just awakening to worst days ahead.

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