VARIOUS: USA CONSIDERING SENDING TROOPS TO LIBERIA TO HELP END VIOLENCE AFTER 14 YEARS OF CIVIL WAR IN COUNTRY, FREED BY FORMER U.S SLAVES IN 1847

Record ID: 838650

  • Title: VARIOUS: USA CONSIDERING SENDING TROOPS TO LIBERIA TO HELP END VIOLENCE AFTER 14 YEARS OF CIVIL WAR IN COUNTRY, FREED BY FORMER U.S SLAVES IN 1847
  • Date: 3rd July 2003
  • Summary: (W6) MONROVIA, LIBERIA (FILE - JULY 19, 1997) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF QUEUE OUTSIDE POLLING STATION (2 SHOTS) SMV WOMEN REGISTERING TO VOTE (2 SHOTS) SMV PEOPLE VOTING SMV FORMER U.S PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER AND OTHER INTERNATIONAL OBSERVERS AT POLLING STATION (W6) MONROVIA, LIBERIA (FILE - JULY 24, 1997) (REUTERS) SCU INDEPENDENT ELECTION COMMISSION PRESIDENT HENRY ANDREWS ANNOUNCING FINAL RESULTS SCU TAYLOR LISTENING AND MAKING V-SIGN, SHAKING HANDS VARIOUS OF PEOPLE CELEBRATING IN STREET (4 SHOTS) SCU SOUNDBITE (English) LIBERIAN PRESIDENT CHARLES TAYLOR SPEAKING TO ALL EX-COMBATANTS SAYING: "I am now your president and I accept the responsibility to make sure I seek your individual and collective welfare." WIDE OF SUPPORTERS CHEERING (W6) ACCRA, GHANA (FILE - JUNE 4, 2003) (REUTERS) WIDE OF DELEGATES AT ACCRA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE CENTRE SCU TAYLOR SEATED ON PODIUM WIDE OF DELEGATES LISTENING (W6) ARTHINGTON, LIBERIA (FILE - JUNE 14, 2003) (REUTERS) WIDE OF PRESIDENT CHARLES TAYLOR ARRIVING IN CONVOY OF VEHICLES SLV SOLDIERS ON VEHICLE VARIOUS SECURITY IN FRONT OF BAPTIST CHURCH (3 SHOTS) SCU SOUNDBITE (English) TAYLOR SAYING: "My people love me, I love my people. All I want is peace in Liberia and I want co-operation with the U.S and I will continue to work for the U.S to understand me. I am very grossly misunderstood." TRACKING SHOT FROM CAR TO DEAD BODY ON THE ROAD WITH GOVERNMENT FIGHTERS PASSING BY SLV GOVERNMENT FIGHTERS IN PICKUP TRUCK SMV GOVERNMENT FIGHTERS AT CHECKPOINT ON ROAD SMOKING AND HOLDING SHOULDER HELD MISSILE LAUNCHER SLV FIGHTERS AT CHECKPOINT SMV ARMED FIGHTER IN TRUCK WITH U.S FLAG/ SLV TRUCK DRIVING AWAY TO FRONT LINE (2 SHOTS)
  • Embargoed: 18th July 2003 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: VARIOUS, LIBERIA/AKOSOMBO AND ACCRA, GHANA/FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE/WASHINGTON, D.C., UNITED STATES
  • City:
  • Country: Liberia
  • Topics: International Relations,Defence / Military
  • Reuters ID: LVAE8R6VPR8X2D5BUZ82S0B7PYCQ
  • Aspect Ratio:
  • Story Text: The United States has been mulling the possibility of sending hundreds of troops to Liberia to help end nearly 14 years of unbroken violence in a country founded by freed American slaves more than 150 years ago.
    Liberia, Africa's oldest independent republic, was founded by freed American slaves in 1847 and has become a byword for chaos and mindless slaughter in a volatile continent.
    Freed American slaves landed in 1822 at a harbour later named Monrovia after U.S. President James Monroe. The country declared itself a self-governing republic in 1847.
    The descendants of the slaves ruled and developed a flourishing economy based on iron ore, diamonds, the flagging of ships and rubber.
    Liberia, a patchwork of ethnic groups like most African nations, enjoyed relative stability until the late 1970s.
    In 1980, tension with the descendants of tribes who were there when the freed slaves arrived spilled over into bloodshed.
    Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, from the Krahn ethnic group, killed President William Tolbert in a coup and then executed members of his government on a palm-fringed beach.
    The coup ended the stranglehold on power of descendants of slaves, known as Congos who had , dominated political power for most of Liberia's existence.
    Doe and his National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL) won elections in 1985 which opposition parties and outside observers said were blatantly rigged.
    In December 1989 former civil servant Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NFPL) launched an invasion from Ivory Coast with 150 guerrillas. The revolt spread unleashing seven years of civil war which spawned rival ethnic or political factions or alliances and killed close on 200,000 people, many of them civilians.
    Attempts to reach agreement between the rival factions failed repeatedly.
    In 1990 the United States was forced to evacuate its nationals as fighting raged on in the capital.
    In the same year West African peacekeepers arrived in Liberia but it took over a dozen peace deals to end the fighting.
    In April and May 1996, the United States airlifted out foreign nationals by helicopter for a second time in the war during political and ethnic clashes in the capital Monrovia.
    Using Sierra Leone as a training base they evacuated foreigners trapped in the city of Monrovia where frenzied looting exacerbated the street-to-street fighting already in progress.
    After almost seven years of civil war, Liberia's West African neighbours rallied their war-torn neighbour's warlords around a peace plan which resulted in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 1997.
    Taylor won the election, ending the war. Foreign monitors, amongst them former U.S President Jimmy Carter, said there were no major flaws in the poll.
    An uneasy peace reigned until 2000 when the rebel force Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), launched attacks in northern Liberia.
    Thousands of people were displaced by the rebellion and in 2002 Taylor declared a state of emergency which he lifted some months later.
    In 2003 a new force has emerged, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) as renewed fighting broke out close to Monrovia.
    In June Taylor travelled to Ghana for internationally mediated peace talks with LURD. While he was there a U.N.
    court indicted him for war crimes the during Sierra Leone civil war in the 1990s.
    Taylor returned to Monrovia where he vowed to continue working for understanding with the United States. work for the U.S to understand me.
    "I am very grossly misunderstood," he said.
    Rebels continued their advance into deserted refugee camps at Monrovia's city boundaries.
    With two rebel factions controlling nearly two-thirds of Liberia, unprecedented demands for him to quit have surfaced in Monrovia.
    Peace negotiations between rebels and Taylor's representatives were also due to start again in Ghana after a week's adjournment, but they have been overshadowed by the pressure on the president to quit.
    War-weary Liberians are now looking towards the United States for help but with its military resources already stretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S must consider its options carefully.
    Its historical ties to the nation of Liberia make the U.S the obvious candidate for intervention.
    But it would be difficult if Taylor remained in office, particularly because of the U.N. indictment against him.
    Washington has tried, through the United Nations and West African countries, to persuade Taylor, who is accused of masterminding more than a decade of tangled regional conflicts, to get out of Liberia.
    There is broad agreement that for Liberia to become politically stable, Taylor will have to leave.
    "I have made up my mind there needs to be stability in Liberia. And one of the conditions for a peaceful and stable Liberia is for Mr. Charles Taylor to leave the country," U.S President George W. Bush told African journalists ahead of a trip to the continent next week.
    Liberia's strife hangs over a visit to Africa on which Bush hopes to highlight an anti-AIDS and economic agenda.
    With growing antipathy to his reign now visible on the streets of Monrovia, is under increasing pressure to quit but with war crimes prosecutors at his heels Taylor will find it difficult to find a welcome in any of his neighbouring states.
    He already turned down one asylum offer from Nigeria.
    Many West African leaders say ending Liberia's war is more important than bringing Taylor to trial. But prosecutors at the court in Sierra Leone say they will pursue Taylor wherever he goes.
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