Liberia Pins Hopes on U.S. Peacekeepers

From the streets to the presidential palace, Liberians on Thursday placed their hopes on American peacekeepers whose role remains up in the air.

Liberian President Charles Taylor said he would step down as soon as U.S. troops arrived to ensure security in this West African country. His departure was a key condition imposed by the Bush administration before troops would be sent.

“I think the peaceful transfer of power, the presence of an international force here, will help a whole lot in making people understand that their security concerns will be considered,” Taylor said in an interview with foreign journalists Thursday. “It’s not an easy situation.”

The U.S. has yet to decide whether to send peacekeepers, despite calls from African leaders urging American involvement.

In Pretoria, South Africa, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said any U.S. participation was likely to be limited. He said he expected the Economic Community of West African States, a regional alliance, to take the lead role.

“If there is U.S. participation, particularly on the ground,” Powell told reporters accompanying President Bush on his five-day tour of Africa, “we fully expect -- and have made it clear to our friends in the international community, ECOWAS and the U.N. -- that we see it as being very limited in duration and scope and really for the purpose of getting ECOWAS in there in sufficient strength to do the long-term rebuilding efforts, stabilization effort and, if, as it becomes appropriate in due course, to put the blue helmets on and be the peacekeeping force for the longer term.”

He added:

“I think the preference would be for Mr. Taylor to leave at about the time that an ECOWAS force is arriving.”

Taylor, who gave no date for his departure, said he could help make the country more secure but that he didn’t think he would get the chance.

“My whole experience over the years has been that for a soldier to take his gun and hand it over, he must be convinced that he won’t be shot at by the guy he’s giving the gun to,” he said. “So there’s a whole process. And I do not see how my presence here would not have aided that soft-landing approach. But I guess that that powerful leader [Bush] sees it a different way.”

The U.S. has sent a military assessment team, which again was cheered by eager Liberians, some of the 1 million people displaced by years of civil war in the country.

Singing “No more war, we want peace” and “We like you, oh Bush, that’s a fact,” one crowd surged forward to get close to the U.S. officials as they trekked through the dilapidated grounds of the former compound of a U.S. radio station, long since converted to a camp for displaced people.

“We want a peacekeeping force to come in right now,” said Maurice Zaza, an official at the camp, about 15 miles outside Monrovia, the capital. “We will be disappointed if [Bush] doesn’t send peacekeepers, frankly speaking.”

“I see him as Jesus,” said Sando Jackson, 36, who fled to the camp two months ago. Bush “can save us. I feel he is here in spirit.”

Amid the praise and jubilation for America came tales of grief and physical suffering.

“It’s two months now we have not had food,” Allison Samu, a member of the camp’s welfare committee, told the touring U.S. delegation. “Many people are sick. There is malnutrition.”

Samu said at least two people a day were dying of hunger or disease at the camp, which is home to about 450 people.

Residents were surviving on the kernels of palm tree nuts and the leaves of root vegetables.

Security is also an immense problem for the domestic refugees.

“At night we don’t sleep,” said camp resident Ciaffa Fahnbulleh, 38. “Fighters go around raping, breaking into people’s homes and looting.”

The crime has forced the camp to close its shabby junior high school and barricade its 1,000 or so textbooks in a room.

“For now the security situation does not allow children to go to school,” said Momo Takieu, an official at the camp. “Education has stopped.”

At the nearby Ricks Institute refugee camp, home to almost 8,000 people, residents complained about being trapped between the army and rebels, both of which accuse them of collaborating.

“We are caught in the middle,” said Ballah Bue, a camp leader. “People are even afraid to go out to find food.”

More than half of Rick’s original 17,000-plus residents have fled the camp in recent weeks due to violence and intimidation.

U.S. officials have described the military team’s mission as strictly to assess the humanitarian situation and recommend solutions.

“We can’t solve their problems for them,” one U.S. official in Monrovia said. “We can recommend to them how to solve their problems.”

Taylor, who has denied charges of fueling conflicts in neighboring countries, has been charged with war crimes by an international tribunal in nearby Sierra Leone. He recently accepted a Nigerian offer of asylum. It is unclear whether that West African powerhouse would eventually hand him over.

In the interview, Taylor underscored the close historical ties between Liberia and the U.S. Many of Liberia’s citizens are descendants of freed American slaves who settled the country in the first half of the 19th century.

“There should be no fear of any GI or American boys coming here,” Taylor said. “You look at the crowds out there. There are pro-government and anti-government crowds that have greeted Americans. They’ve mobbed your people on the streets of Monrovia.

“This is no Somalia,” he added, referring to the deaths of American troops in 1993. “It will never be any Somalia.”

Taylor insisted that the U.S. had an obligation to do more for Liberia in the long term.

“I think America has an opportunity to demonstrate something positive in Liberia that they have not done in 157 years of our independence,” he said. “They must seize this opportunity. Liberians are disappointed that Americans have not looked favorably here.”

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Times staff writer Edwin Chen in South Africa contributed to this report.