U.S. Dispatches 2 More Warships to Liberia; More Than 1,000 Evacuated

With armed looters controlling the Liberian capital’s increasingly dangerous streets, the United States sent two more warships toward the country Friday to join a growing military presence that officials declared is solely intended to protect U.S. diplomats and fleeing foreigners.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said that the number of evacuees airlifted from Liberia by U.S. forces had topped 1,000, about 165 of whom were Americans. He predicted that many of the remaining Americans will be evacuated soon.

“I think you’ll see the number of Americans out of Liberia grow quite dramatically over the next 24 hours,” Burns said. But he added that evacuation of all 470 or so Americans known to have been in the country when the recent round of fighting began may take longer because of the difficulty in getting all of them to collection points.

Hundreds of other foreigners left the capital, Monrovia, aboard a ship chartered by the World Food Program, a U.N. agency.

Ghana’s deputy foreign minister, Mohamed Ibn Chambas, announced late Friday that the warring factions had agreed to a cease-fire after negotiations involving the United Nations, international aid agencies and West African peacekeepers.

Chambas said the peacekeepers will cordon off military barracks where supporters of Roosevelt Johnson, fired recently as minister of rural development, are holed up with thousands of refugees and scores of hostages. The barracks has been shelled continually since fighting erupted a week ago when Liberia’s coalition government tried to arrest Johnson on murder charges.

The Ghanaian diplomat said Johnson had agreed to cooperate in the implementation of the truce on condition that his concerns be speedily addressed.

Before the reported cease-fire, U.S. officials said the situation in Monrovia had grown increasingly tense. Armed looters, many of them members of competing militias, roamed the city. A U.N. official said all of the organization’s offices “have been stripped to the last paper clip.”

The Pentagon said that five U.S. warships are now on their way toward Liberia, a formidable force that is expected to reach the country next week.

Counting about 1,900 sailors and more than 1,500 Marines aboard the ships, the total number of U.S. military personnel assigned to the Liberia operation has grown to about 4,500. Only about 150 of those are on the ground in Monrovia, while more than 800 U.S. personnel are deployed in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in Dakar, Senegal--the destination points for the evacuation flights.

A Pentagon spokesman said that the American military force has been deployed only to evacuate foreigners and protect U.S. diplomatic property. He said that the Americans will not intervene in Liberia’s civil war, although their rules of engagement authorize the use of force if necessary to safeguard the evacuees and the U.S. Embassy.

But Burns said that the Clinton administration is considering a request from the World Food Program to assign U.S. military personnel to help in the delivery of food to an increasingly hungry population.

“We haven’t made any decisions about whether we would use our military forces for that purpose,” Burns said. “They have a mission now. It’s a singular mission. They need to complete it, and I expect the evacuation will have to continue at least through the weekend.”

A spokesman for the World Food Program said that between 50,000 and 60,000 Liberian civilians have been forced from their homes by the fighting and are living in impromptu camps around the city, where shortages of food and water have become critical. About 20,000 of those are holed up in a U.S. Embassy-owned residential complex.

“We’ve got enough food, but we don’t have the means of getting it where it is supposed to go,” the spokesman said.

He said the organization is negotiating with the militia led by warlord Charles Taylor to provide security for food deliveries.

Chambas said aid agencies have been guaranteed protection under the new cease-fire agreement to distribute food to thousands of starving people, but he did not elaborate.

Taylor touched off the civil war in 1989 when he led a band of exiles into Liberia from Ivory Coast to topple the regime of Samuel K. Doe. Taylor’s forces captured Doe and tortured him to death in 1990.