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Ghana peace talks continue after truce

Rivals in Liberia's four-year civil war held a second day of peace talks in Ghana yesterday with President Charles Taylor and the rebels fighting his regime displaying few signs of compromise.

Representatives from the government, two rebel groups and 18 Liberian political parties resumed working sessions in the west African-brokered talks in Akosombo, some 100km from Accra.

The talks got under way after Taylor and the main rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), agreed in principle on Wednesday to a truce.

The rebels now control most of the country and are on the edges of the capital Monrovia.

The truce is due to be signed by this week, according to negotiators.

President Taylor was indicted last week by the UN Special Court in Sierra Leone for crimes against humanity and war crimes during the decade-long civil war in Liberia's northwestern neighbor, in which some 200,000 people lost their lives.

Taylor, addressing a press conference in Monrovia just before the opening of the peace talks in Ghana to end his country's ruinous civil war, said the charges would have to be scrapped so that the parleys may succeed.

"If this peace process is to succeed, this indictment has to be removed," Taylor, who has been accused of backing former Sierra Leonean rebels in that country's brutal decade-long war, said.

The latest peace talks began last week but were suspended after LURD forces battled their way to the suburbs of Monrovia last Friday.

Thursday's session in a tightly-guarded Akosombo hotel lasted only an hour.

It started with a poem read out by a six-year-old Liberian refugee girl named Lucy Sherman.

"You are killing us with your selfishness and fighting. Please let us have peace," Sherman said.

The chief mediator, former Nigerian president Abdulsalami Abubakar, said he needed to discuss some key issues with the rebels and that the talks would resume yesterday morning.

The noises from the rebels were not encouraging.

"We are not prepared to deal with Taylor or his government," said LURD delegate George Dweh in Akosombo. "The man is not honest. We are even prepared to talk and sign an agreement with commanders of the army."

The newly emerged Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) rebel group, active in the south of the impoverished west African country, made similar comments.

"We are not prepared to speak to Taylor or his delegation. The man must leave now," said the group's Tia Slanger.

But Taylor's Defense Minister Daniel Chea, leading the government delegation at the talks, retorted: "It will be nonsense to expect President Taylor to leave Liberia, it is ridiculous to expect the indictment on him to stick."

The rebels' battle with government forces is part of almost uninterrupted civil war that has raged since the early 1990s and that left an estimated 200,000 people dead in a country that was founded in 1847 by slaves freed from America.
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