Liberia's caretaker president urged West African peacekeepers on Monday to push into the lawless bush and stop carnage taking place despite a week-old peace deal meant to end nearly 14 years of conflict.
Reports of civilians, including women and children, shot or hacked to death began to emerge from the hard-to-reach interior. There were conflicting accounts of who was to blame as civilians were once again caught in a crossfire of war and ethnic hatreds.
"They killed some 25 people. I saw the bodies myself," Targen Wanteh, a former Liberian ambassador to Guinea, said by satellite phone from the bush near Bahn in eastern Nimba County after fleeing what he said was a rebel attack.
"They shot some people, cut women and children into pieces, opened up their stomachs, cut their heads and laid the bodies in front of their houses," said Wanteh.
President Moses Blah, due under the peace deal to hand over to the head of a new interim administration in October, said many people had been killed in Nimba County and that fighting was flaring in a string of places outside the capital Monrovia.
The violence underlined the challenges in cementing the peace deal between the government and rebels when many fighters, including drugged-up teenagers, are deep in the bush beyond lines of control and communications.
Blah called on peacekeepers from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to spread out swiftly from Monrovia, which they have secured with the help of US Marines flown in from three warships off Liberia's coast.
"We want ECOWAS to hurry up with the deployment and make sure they deploy throughout the country to stop the carnage on our people," Blah said at his home in Monrovia.
Echoing his predecessor Charles Taylor, who stepped down and went into exile under international pressure earlier this month, Blah said Liberia's armed forces were unable to defend themselves because of a UN arms embargo.
reports of massacre
Liberia's state radio said on Sunday many civilians had been massacred by rebels in Bahn, some 240km northeast of Monrovia.
It quoted one source as saying 1,000 civilians had been killed, but no independent confirmation was available.
A spokesman for the peacekeepers, known also as ECOMIL, said they had no plans for now to deploy towards Nimba County.
"We're still very thin on the ground. We don't have enough men," said Colonel Theophilus Tawiah, adding that the next target for the force would be to deploy to the rebel-held port city of Buchanan.
About 1,550 peacekeepers are in Liberia and some 750 new soldiers are due this week from Ghana, Mali and Senegal.
Wanteh said villages around Bahn had been burned down by fighters from Liberia's two rebel groups, Model and LURD.
"Everybody said Nimba County was Taylor's stronghold, so they want to destroy this place and the international community is not doing anything," he said.
A radio operator in Monrovia said contacts with Nimba County had produced reports of Model rebels hacking people to death with knives and machetes.
Since Taylor launched a rebellion in 1989 to win power, Liberia has seen little but violence and has been the epicenter of a regional cycle of bloodshed in which 250,000 people have been killed. Taylor is now in exile in Nigeria.
Last week's peace deal cleared the way for the creation of interim government to guide Liberia to elections in two years.
RSS