West African peacekeepers were Tuesday to build up their strength at Liberia's main airport in preparation for a risky mission to bring stability and humanitarian aid to its wartorn capital Monrovia.
After the arrival of a 300-strong Nigerian advance guard at Robertsfield Airport on Monday was greeted with joy by hundreds of war-weary civilians, the newly formed ECOMIL force's next task was to secure the city itself.
There they will face the much harder challenge of securing the delivery of food and medical aid to the 200,000 displaced Liberian non-combatants sheltering in the beleaguered capital, which has been under siege since June 5.
PHOTO: AP
Before the troops can begin to do that, helicopters must ferry in more men and equipment from UN bases in neighboring Sierra Leone. Military sources said it would be eight days before the advance force was at full strength.
The full complement of 3,000 to 5,000 men could take up to a month to deploy.
Meanwhile, as night fell on Monrovia, scattered bursts of gunfire could still be heard, despite promises from both Liberian President Charles Taylor's loyalist forces and the rebels to respect a ceasefire deal.
Mark, a 19-year-old serving with the "Jungle Lions" pro-Taylor militia, said that most of the firing was now linked to looting, and often involved clashes by former allies on the government side.
"The fighters want to steal things to sell to the peacekeepers when they arrive," he said. "It is good that they (ECOMIL) are here. They should move into the city, to bring stability and peace."
With fighting apparently subsiding -- and both sides insisting that they will follow a west African brokered plan to bring to an end Liberia's latest four year bout of civil war -- Taylor's role was once again center stage.
The former warlord has promised the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that he will step down on Monday, Aug. 11, but it is not yet clear whether he will quit Liberia and go into exile as he has been asked.
In Washington, the White House and the State Department said Taylor, who has been charged with war crimes by a court in Sierra Leone, ought to leave Liberia and face the charges to secure progress in the peace process.
At a news conference in Rome, rebel leader Sekou Damate Conneh -- head of the self-styled Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) -- said his forces would leave Monrovia as soon as the peace force is in place.
"We are prepared to receive the peacekeepers in Liberia as soon as they deploy in the city and the port to save the civilians there. We are prepared to withdraw immediately," Conneh told reporters.
LURD, along with a splinter rebel faction, now controls around four-fifths of the country, an impoverished land of 111,400 km2 of bush, swamp and tropical forest on Africa's Atlantic shore.
But they have proved unable or unwilling to capture the capital Monrovia, a port city lying on a string of islands and peninsulas, now teeming with around 200,000 refugees, desperate for food and clean water.
The ECOMIL mission has UN backing and for the first month of its existence the force will receive logistical support from the UN force in Liberia, UNAMSIL, but thereafter it will rely on international funding.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion