The wife of the leader of Liberia's most powerful rebel movement announced Tuesday she was taking charge, backed by dozens of guerrilla commanders in ousting a husband whose ambitions she said were endangering the nation's hard-won peace.
In a family feud with West Africa's stability in the balance, the regionally influential Asha Keita-Conneh flatly declared she was the "double boss" of her husband, and of the movement.
Husband Sekou Conneh frantically took to state radio, insisting it was only a marital squabble that was over, leaving him still in charge.
PHOTO: AP
"I put him there. If you open a big business and you put your husband in charge, if you see that things are not going the right way, you set him aside, and straighten things up," Keita-Conneh said as her nursing daughter lay beside her on a bed in the family home.
A powerfully built woman in brown caftan and head-wrap, Keita-Conneh promised she would put Liberia's six-month-old peace process on track.
"I will never agree for anybody to fight in this country again," she said.
Around her, fighters of the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy movement nodded assent. Dignitaries streamed in for consultations.
Unless rapidly resolved, the marital and militia dispute threatens to destabilize Liberia, where a UN force growing to the world's largest, at 15,000-strong, is backing a power-sharing government after 14 years of warlord power-struggles that killed a quarter-million people.
Peace came to Liberia only on Aug. 11, when longtime warlord president Charles Taylor fled into exile as the rebels laid siege to his capital, and international peacekeepers moved in.
The risk Tuesday: a lasting rift between loyalists of rebel husband and rebel wife, reviving factional fighting.
Divided, fighters weighed their allegiance.
"This lady can lead," declared one insurgent, rebel Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Kanneh, at the Conneh compound.
Civilians voiced fears about the effects of the dispute.
"Women can lead better than men in many ways, but the situation in LURD is quite different," said Marie Johnson, a 26-year-old resident of Monrovia, where thousands died under rebel and government mortars and rockets just months ago.
"Sanity needs to be restored to the organization," the woman said. "This does not augur well for the peace process."
Ghana Ambassador Kwame Amoa-Awua and other diplomats shuttled between camps of husband and wife, hoping "to iron out whatever differences," Amoa-Awua said. "Whatever happens in LURD is of great significance to the peace process, because LURD is a major actor."
Keita-Conneh's claim to control, beyond the rarity of putting a woman in charge of an armed guerrilla movement with thousands of fighters, had a measure of credibility.
Keita-Conneh long has been seen as a hidden power behind the rebel movement, with her influence coming from her alleged position as spiritual adviser to President Lansana Conte of neighboring Guinea.
Keita-Conneh is widely said to have won the Guinea leader's loyalty with her correct prediction of a 1996 mutiny against Conte, which he withstood.
In gratitude, the Guinean president made her his adopted daughter.
Later, in the 1990s, Conte is alleged to have funded and armed the LURD uprising in anger at Taylor's armed incursions into his own country.
When the group launched its insurgency in 1999, Keita-Conneh's husband, a little-known former used-car salesman, emerged as the movement's civilian leader.
Conte's regime denies backing LURD, and Conneh denies his wife is Conte's medium. The Guinea leader and Keita-Conneh are only "very, very, very close," her husband said recently.
Under Liberia's Aug. 18 interim power-sharing deal, Conneh and other leaders on all sides in the war are prohibited from holding high office.
In recent weeks especially, Conneh has openly chafed at the restriction, complaining of having no job and accusing the current power-sharing government of bad faith.
The peace process has not run smoothly under Conneh's LURD. LURD was the last of Liberia's three armed factions -- two rebel movements and Taylor's former government -- to allow deployment of UN forces in a stronghold town.
Non-compliance from LURD also contributed to the breakdown of UN-sponsored disarmament nationwide, due to resume in stages this week.
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