Fighting Erupts in Liberia’s Second Largest City

Liberian Defense Minister Daniel Chea told the Associated Press, ”We received attack in Buchanan.”

“There is fighting going on there now.”

At stake are the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, who have fled to Buchanan in recent days hoping to escape fierce battling in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

Buchanan, a coastal city 60 miles southeast of the capital, is the last remaining seaport controlled by Taylor’s government. Rebel control of the port could hamper efforts to get humantarian aid into the country. The main rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), took Monrovia’s port on July 19.

The latest fighting in Buchanan – between government forces and the country’s second largest rebel group Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) – came as the U.S., the United Nations and Liberia’s West African neighbors tried to negotiate peace and discussed who would head an international peacekeeping effort to quell the violence.

Debates over who should pay for a military deployment have slowed response from Nigeria, the region’s largest military power. In the U.S., President Bush, under pressure from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, has deployed 2,300 troops just off the Liberian coast, but has said West African and U.N. troops must lead the way.

In recent weeks, Liberians have laid the bodies of those killed in the fighting outside the American embassy in Monrovia in a desperate attempt to speed up international assistance.

At the Monrovia College campus, converted into a shelter for 2,000 refugees, college president the Rev. Franklin Holt criticized the U.S. and other countries that have promised intervention.

“We are hoping that the peacekeeping forces are coming this week to relieve us of all this misery,” Holt told the Associated Press. “They are very late. Extremely late.”

Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves in 1847, has been wracked by civil war for much of the last 14 years. From 1989 to 1996, Liberian warlords battled for control of the country. At the end of that war, Charles Taylor emerged as the strongest militia leader and rode that position into the office of the president.

For three tense years, the country avoided war, but in 1999, reinvigorated rebel groups launched a new war. Many regional experts said that Taylor’s repressive rule helped empower and spark the new rebellion, which has raged ever since.

After a cease-fire agreement failed to bring peace in June, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo offered Taylor exile in exchange for his resignation. Taylor has repeatedly said he would leave, but has made that move contingent on the arrival of international peacekeepers.

Since June, fighting between Taylor’s troops and the two heavily armed rebel groups has killed hundreds of civilians, many of whom fled their homes for Monrovia. The city of 1.3 million now has become home to some 100,000 refugees and is plagued by daily bombing and gunfire, disease and famine.