Nigerian leader meets Liberia's president Taylor to discuss asylum offer

Associated Press | July 6, 2003 | GLENN MCKENZIE

[HAL9000]

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) -- The leader of Nigeria and embattled Liberian President Charles Taylor met Sunday for what aides said would be a discussion of a Nigerian offer of asylum for Taylor, an accused war criminal under intense international pressure to give up the leadership of his civil-war divided country.

Liberian officials said on Saturday that Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo and Taylor will discuss a Nigerian offer of temporary asylum until Taylor finds permanent exile in a third country. Neither man addressed reporters before entering a private salon at Monrovia's airport on Sunday.

Obasanjo earlier stepped from his jet into an embrace and kisses on both cheeks by Taylor. Taylor's retinue handed Obasanjo, dressed in flowing traditional robes, a live white chicken and some cola nuts - a customary Liberian gift symbolizing purity of heart and peace.

Taylor's spokesman, Vaanii Paasawe, told The Associated Press that the two leaders hadn't before personally discussed an asylum offer. If they had, "why would (Obasanjo) be coming here today?" Paasawe said.

U.S. President George W. Bush - due to visit Africa this week and considering how to aid a military force to impose calm in Liberia - has demanded that Taylor resign as leader of the country, a west African nation founded in the 19th century by freed American slaves.

"I suspect he will," Bush said in radio comments aired Saturday. "I'm not going to take 'no' for an answer."

A 15-member U.S. scout team was preparing to leave Europe and head for Liberia on Sunday, said a European Command spokesman, Master Sgt. John Tomassi, in Stuttgart, Germany.

Bush has said the team will assess how the United States can help an intervention force to be deployed to stabilize Liberia, which has known only strife since Taylor launched his own insurgency in 1989.

Taylor, who has broken promises before, has pledged to quit his office when a force arrives.

West African leaders have put up 3,000 troops for a force and added their voices to the chorus calling for U.S. soldiers to lead the mission. The United States has said it won't be pressured into making a decision before Bush leaves Monday for a five-day, five-nation, African tour.

Bush is scheduled to land Tuesday in Senegal, one largely peaceful west African nation that hasn't seen the ill effects of years of warmaking by Taylor - a former warlord long accused of sowing strife in the region by aiding rebel groups.

Bush is scheduled to visit Nigeria - Africa's most-populous nation and a regional economic, military and diplomatic powerhouse - later in the week and is expected to meet Obasanjo. Liberia isn't on Bush's travel plan.

Taylor has for three years battled an insurgency - whose forces last month briefly thrust into Liberia's capital and final government stronghold, Monrovia.

Hundreds died in the fighting and citizens fear that the rebels, whose say their forces remain close to Monrovia, will enter the city again, sparking widespread urban warfare.

On June 4, a U.N.-backed tribunal in Sierra Leone indicted Taylor on war crimes for his role in that country's recently ended decade of terror.

Nigeria, like many countries, has no law allowing Taylor to be extradited to the court, U.N. officials say.

Others have accused Taylor of supporting the brutal Revolutionary United Front rebels, whose trademark atrocity was amputating the arms and facial features of their civilian victims with machetes.

On Sunday, 304 Sierra Leone refugees arrived in their capital, Freetown, after being evacuated from Monrovia, where nearly 100,000 people fleeing recent fighting have piled into the city and now face disease and hunger.

Nearly one third of Liberia's 3 million people have been forced from their homes by fighting since rebels took up arms against Taylor in 1999.

Taylor sparked Liberia's strife when he launched his 1989-1996 insurrection. He was elected president in 1997 by a war-weary populace.

Copyright 2003 Associated Press, All rights reserved

[jocon307]

"West African leaders have put up 3,000 troops for a force and added their voices to the chorus calling for U.S. soldiers to lead the mission."

People of the world, make up your minds! First you tell the US we are imperialists, and then you beg us to intervene. I think we should make up our own minds on when and where to go, and what to do when we get there.

[oceanview]

Taylor accepts the asylum offer. I say, some accident still should be arranged for him.