Posted on 08/12/2003 6:17:38 AM PDT by Pikamax
New Fighting Erupts in Liberia with Taylor Gone Tue August 12, 2003 08:05 AM ET By David Clarke MONROVIA, Liberia (Reuters) - New fighting raged in Liberia Tuesday a day after former President Charles Taylor flew into exile amid hopes his departure would help bring peace to the war-shattered West African country.
Liberia's government and a rebel faction called Model accused each other of starting the latest bloodshed as the rebels made a big advance to just a few miles from the international airport outside the capital Monrovia.
Meanwhile another rebel faction, holding the port that is key to getting aid to hundreds of thousands of famished refugees, said clearly for the first time that they wanted to head an interim administration now Taylor was gone.
The fear of many Liberians has long been a vicious three-way struggle for power between loyalist militias and the tribe-based rebel factions, remnants of a civil war in the 1990s.
Waiting off the coast to try to bolster peace efforts and bring in aid are three U.S. warships with 2,300 Marines aboard, but Washington has not said it will commit ground troops.
Liberia's Defense Minister Daniel Chea urged West African peacekeepers, whose force of about 800 is still far from up to strength, to move in and stop the fighting near the airport, some 45 km (28 miles) from Monrovia itself.
"There is no reason for this. Taylor has left, that's what they wanted. Their agenda just seems to be total annihilation of the Liberian people," he told Reuters.
A spokesman for the Model rebel faction, General Boi Bleaju Boi, blamed the government loyalists and said: "I do not agree that the war is over. The government elements who have been causing trouble are still in place, they are attacking us."
Residents of the town of Harbel, near the latest fighting, said refugees who had fled there to escape the recent bloodbath in Monrovia had now turned tail and were on the move again.
APPEAL FOR U.S. HELP
New President Moses Blah, Taylor's former deputy, has appealed to President Bush to intervene and offered the rebels the post of vice-president as an olive branch to try to reunite a land broken by nearly 14 years of violence.
"Please save us from this nightmare, we are suffering, we are dying," Blah told CNN in an interview.
Rebels were expected to meet U.S. embassy officials at 2 p.m. (1400 GMT) to discuss a pullback from parts of Monrovia and reopening the port. Washington has said the task force commander may soon land in Monrovia.
The priority is helping the masses of hungry refugees fleeing violence that killed 2,000 people in Monrovia since June, the latest chapter of a conflict that has destroyed Liberia and sent savage offshoots into neighboring states.
But rebels from the main Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) faction said that even if they withdrew from the port they would insist on keeping their hard-won foothold in Monrovia's suburbs.
For the first time Tuesday, they also changed their message that they had simply come to get rid of Taylor and added that they wanted to head an interim government.
"We were responsible for the downfall of Charles Taylor... We want to serve in the highest capacity. That means we can be president of the interim government," Sekou Fofana, the top rebel official in Monrovia told reporters.
The message was a perfect echo of Taylor's own when he invaded Liberia in 1989, saying he wanted to oust then dictator Samuel Doe. Seven years of war followed despite Doe's murder and Taylor was eventually elected in 1997.
He arrived early Tuesday in the southeast Nigerian town of Calabar to begin his exile at a set of elegant villas prepared for him and dozens of family members and associates.
Hemmed in by rebels and U.N. sanctions and wanted by a U.N.-backed war crimes court in neighboring Sierra Leone, Taylor had little option but to leave or fight to the death.
The rebels, who mistrust Blah as an old Taylor ally, have said the October date set by West African leaders for the president to hand over to an interim leader is too long.
The media seems to up to their old lazy journalism too.
News reports assert that the "Taylor regime" is "gone" when in fact all that has occured is that power has been transfered to the Vice President who (obviously) is part of the "Taylor" regime.
There are shades of the media's South African coverage here as well. In that the rise to power of the ANC was heralded as the start of "demcoracy" when all that had essentially occured was the tranfer of power from one repressive regime to another.
The media has a nasty habit of portraying (by deception) the end of a problem when basically not much has changed. Rather Orwellian as well.
The media seems to up to their old lazy journalism too.
News reports assert that the "Taylor regime" is "gone" when in fact all that has occured is that power has been transfered to the Vice President who (obviously) is part of the "Taylor" regime.
There are shades of the media's South African coverage here as well. In that the rise to power of the ANC was heralded as the start of "demcoracy" when all that had essentially occured was the transfer of power from one repressive regime to another.
The media has a nasty habit of portraying (by deception) the end of a problem when basically not much has changed. Rather Orwellian as well.
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