Liberian Leader Agrees to Exile, Presses the U.S.

President Charles Taylor of Liberia accepted an offer of asylum in Nigeria on Sunday and invited U.S. “participation” in a peaceful transition of power, even as some congressional leaders urged restraint before committing U.S. troops to the West African country.

“We believe the participation of the U.S. right now is crucial in whatever way,” Taylor said at a news conference in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, shortly after Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo offered him haven “any time he chooses to take advantage of it.”

The Liberian president, who has been indicted on war crimes charges by a U.N.-sponsored court, gave no timeline for his departure, except to say that “things must be done quickly.”

“We have accepted the [Nigerian] invitation. I think it is a matter now of making sure it is done using our brains; it is done properly,” Taylor said.

That would seem to open the way for U.S. troops to be sent to help stabilize the country. President Bush, who leaves tonight for a five-day visit to five African nations, has repeatedly made Taylor’s departure from Liberia a precondition for any such involvement.

But senior congressional members of Bush’s own party voiced anxiety Sunday about the risks of sending U.S. troops into the bloody, volatile conflict.

“We’ve got to think through very, very carefully the insertion of U.S. forces in there,” Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added that he believed Congress should take a vote before U.S. troops are deployed.

Taylor came to prominence in 1989 as the leader of a lengthy insurrection that resulted in the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Liberians. The civil strife ended in 1996 with the country in virtual collapse.

A year later, Taylor was elected president -- in part, it was said at the time, due to fears that he would restart the war if he lost -- and rebels have been fighting to unseat him since 1999. Currently, the rebels control two-thirds of the nation.

Because of Taylor’s previous promises to depart, the White House reaction to Sunday’s announcement was restrained. A June 17 cease-fire accord called for an international peacekeeping force, but that agreement collapsed when Taylor rescinded a pledge to step down and rebels attacked the capital.

The difference now is that Taylor appears to have a place to go, and the White House reiterated Bush’s insistence that Taylor act swiftly.

“He needs to leave so that peace can be established,” said White House spokesman Jimmy Orr.

West African nations have offered to provide 3,000 soldiers if the United States commits 2,000 troops to a peacekeeping force in Liberia.

The World Health Organization says that Liberians are in urgent need of food, medicine, clothing and chlorine to treat water. A small “humanitarian assistance survey team” of U.S. military experts headed to Monrovia on Sunday night.

The mounting pressure on the U.S. to get directly involved in Liberia underscores the growing importance of the continent, just as Bush prepares to depart for Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria.

“Africa is an enormous part of our future, and this is going to be a very hard thing for the American people to come to terms with,” Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “That is a whole continent full of problems waiting for us.”

The controversy in Liberia also challenges core foreign policy principles that Bush campaigned on in 2000: his aversion to “nation building” and his tendency to relegate Africa to a secondary priority. Now, he is contemplating the largest military deployment in Africa since 1992 when, just before his father’s term in the White House ended, the senior Bush sent about 25,000 troops to Somalia.

Congress traditionally rallies behind the president in such matters. But Warner’s call for a congressional vote came only one day after he received a Pentagon briefing on the situation in Liberia. He indicated that he left the briefing even more concerned about the danger to the military than he was going in.

“It’s a presidential decision,” Warner said. “But I would say to the Senate leadership -- and, most respectfully, to the president -- I would want a vote in the Congress before we begin to commit substantial forces into that region.”

Congressional consideration of a U.S. military role as peacekeeper would be unusual. Although presidents often ask for a vote before going to war, they have routinely deployed peacekeeping forces without getting the formal support of Congress. Orr, the White House spokesman, said it was premature to speculate what Bush would do.

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” said Orr. “This presupposes that the president has made a decision to send troops, and he hasn’t.”

Echoing Warner’s anxieties, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was concerned that U.S. troops were straining to manage conflicts on different fronts: fighting terrorism at home, maintaining ongoing operations in Afghanistan, and occupying and rebuilding Iraq. The U.S. has about 146,000 troops in Iraq and 9,000 in Afghanistan, with an additional 3,300 in the Balkans and tens of thousands tied up in long-standing commitments in Germany and South Korea.

“I’d be very cautious about this,” said Roberts on CNN. “We have three wars to fight.”

Washington policymakers are also worried about repeating the imbroglio that beset U.S. troops in Somalia. That mission also was launched under international pressure and in response to humanitarian concerns about starvation as a result of civil war. But U.S. troops became the target of warlords, and 18 American soldiers were killed in 1993.

“I don’t want to send our troops into an area where they’re going to become targets under the banner of peacekeeping,” Roberts said.

But advocates of a U.S. role in Liberia argue that, whatever the risks, it is essential to maintaining the stability of the entire continent.

“The credibility of the U.S. -- especially on the eve of the president’s trip to Africa and given the small number of troops involved -- justifies our doing it,” Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa, said Sunday. “The whole region will continue in instability if we don’t settle things in Liberia.”

Others argue that the U.S. has a special obligation to Liberia because of their historic ties. Liberia was founded by freed American slaves in the 1800s, and its capital, Monrovia, was named for President James Monroe.

However, any U.S. engagement would probably be limited -- a factor that concerns Africa observers.

“It’s not clear what type of regime might get in place,” said Pauline Baker, president of the Fund for Peace, a Washington-based policy center that promotes conflict resolution. “There’s a big question mark of what comes next.... There has to be stability to have a post-Taylor regime. That means you’ve got to have troops there.”

If international peacekeepers were to intervene in Liberia, but then leave too quickly, any peace deal could quickly unravel, leading to a resumption of fighting.

Taylor faces another problem upon his departure: the war crimes tribunal in neighboring Sierra Leone. That court indicted him last month for his role in helping to fuel a now-ended decade of war in Sierra Leone by supporting brutal rebel forces.

“I regard him as the Milosevic of West Africa,” said Baker, referring to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, currently on trial for war crimes at an international tribunal at The Hague. “He is a serial warmonger. It’s long past the time for him to go. But unlike Milosevic, he may not be brought to trial.”

At the news conference Sunday, Obasanjo said the sole condition for Nigeria’s asylum offer is that his country “not be harassed ... by any organization or country for showing this humanitarian gesture.”

However, Tom Perriello, a spokesman for the U.N. special prosecutor in Sierra Leone, said international law and a treaty between Nigeria and Sierra Leone would permit Nigeria to extradite Taylor to its West African neighbor.

“If Nigeria wants to extradite him to us, they can,” Perriello said. “It’s a question of their political will. The legal stuff” -- contentions that Nigeria’s treaty does not cover the ad hoc war crimes court -- “is a smokescreen.”

Some analysts have said that Taylor could try to sway public opinion against U.S. deployment in Liberia by ordering his fighters to inflict casualties on U.S. troops, just as the Somali warlords targeted U.S. soldiers.

But John Prendergast, who heads the Africa program for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said American military leaders were likely to deal harshly with Taylor if he caused trouble.

“Taylor should not mess with the Americans because they will take him out,” said Prendergast. “Their message to him would be: ‘If you try to stop us, we’ll beat you with a sledgehammer.’ ”

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Times staff writers Davan Maharaj in Los Angeles and Ann M. Simmons in Johannesburg, South Africa, contributed to this report.