Enraged Liberians Call for 
U.S. Help as Rebels Attack

SOMINI SENGUPTA / NY Times 22jul03

MONROVIA, Liberia, July 21—United States marines arrived by helicopter this morning to protect the American Embassy and help evacuate foreigners from the capital as it fell under the heaviest shelling to date. Hundreds of enraged Liberians, in a desperate offering before the country they call their "big brother," laid the mutilated bodies of their loved ones by the embassy's shuttered black steel gate.

"G. Bush Killer Liberia"

Embassy guards watched from behind fortified, glass-walled posts as the Liberians, many from a compound across the street that is owned by the embassy, howled, held their heads in their hands and clasped their noses as they put down 18 bodies, already smelling in the steamy heat. At least one child had had his head blown off. Others were blasted beyond recognition. Blood stained the asphalt.

By day's end, reports from hospitals and clinics suggested that roughly 90 Liberians had been killed and more than 360 had been wounded.

The fighting today, the third day of the third rebel attack in six weeks, was the fiercest so far in this capital, named after an American president, James Monroe. The crowd that gathered before the embassy—indeed, most Liberians on the streets today—angrily blamed Americans, who founded the republic 150 years ago, saying they were dithering on how to help restore peace to this ravaged country.

[In Washington, Bush administration officials rejected appeals by the United Nations secretary general and West African nations to take the lead in deploying a peacekeeping force to Liberia. But the Pentagon has moved an amphibious landing force of 4,500 sailors and marines closer to Liberia as a precaution. Page A3.]

Three weeks have passed since President Bush called on the Liberian president, Charles G. Taylor, to step aside, and pledged American assistance in restoring security. But there has been no definitive word here on how or when.

"Oh God, oh God, what do we do now?" wailed one woman in front of the entrance to the embassy. "We can't die for nothing."

"I'm begging to you," another woman screamed to the sky. "We're dying here." A man yelled, "Why can't the Americans come in to rescue us?"

The rebel army, called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, has said its aim is to oust Mr. Taylor, a former rebel leader himself. Mr. Taylor, accused by a tribunal created by the United Nations and Sierra Leone of crimes against humanity in connection with the war in Sierra Leone, has said he will not step down until peacekeepers arrive.

Twenty-one marines, part of the Fleet Anti-Terrorist Security Team, arrived on three helicopters this morning. The helicopters left later for Sierra Leone, carrying 25 Americans and other foreigners who requested evacuation from the city, including some United Nations officials and relief workers leaving behind clinics filled with the wounded.

"We can't move around; we can't do any work," said Eleanor Monbiot, relief coordinator for World Vision, an aid agency, as she boarded one of the helicopters.

Government militias rode through downtown today in two of World Vision's vehicles, which had apparently been stolen.

The three helicopters were supposed to return this afternoon, to bring 20 more marines and take away other foreigners, but the aircraft did not come.

Mortar rounds began pounding the neighborhood of the embassy just before 12:30 this afternoon. One shell landed on the embassy grounds, wounding two. Other shells dropped inside the encampments of displaced people and around a hotel housing several Western journalists. Others fell helter-skelter all afternoon in the ocean and on the roads.

Shortly before 1 p.m., a boy, scampering down a dirt path with a plastic shopping bag full of potato greens, was killed when a mortar round fell next to him; a school card identified him as Lasana Harding, a seventh grader.

One man, his right leg mutilated by the same explosion, was ferried to the nearest clinic on a woven nylon mat.

For the next several hours, men and women streamed down a seaside avenue toward two clinics run by the aid agency Doctors Without Borders. A small boy wailed as he ran, holding a baby on his back. Two men ran, holding their bleeding sides, and a woman carried a bleeding child in her arms.

At least 25 people were killed when mortar rounds fell into the Grey-stone compound, a storage yard that now houses more than 20,000 Liberians seeking shelter from the latest assaults. Among the wounded were two Liberian guards employed by the American Embassy.

It was impossible to determine today which parts of the city were in rebel hands. Fighting resumed for control of two bridges leading into the city center. Government militias fired rocket-propelled grenades across one bridge and sprayed the air with heavy machine guns. At one point, they displayed the head of a man they called a rebel soldier.

Early in the afternoon, a mortar round fell on government forces in what is usually a crowded market downtown. An American journalist for Newsweek suffered minor injuries during that explosion and was in stable condition tonight.

In the middle of it all, one soldier, loading bullets, declared: "I don't know why we're fighting. It's just Liberians fighting Liberians."

The American pledges of help to stabilize Liberia came as little solace today to the crowds that gathered across the street from the embassy when they heard the roar of the helicopters through the rain. "Is it the peacekeeping force?" Mark Williams, a father of three, wondered hopefully.

When he learned why the Marines had landed, he dropped his eyes to the ground. "It's good to protect their installations, but we ourselves are feeling the heat, too," he said.

Lewis Saywon, whose family is still behind rebel lines, was enraged. "Helicopters always dropping, but each time what are they doing?" he snapped.

Alexander Lake, 23, who is living in a United Nations building, said: "We think America is a big brother. What do they think of us now? They all want us to die here?"

Less than an hour later the shelling began and Liberians began dying again.

One young man held up a torn sheet of cardboard, his fury scrawled with a black marker. "G. Bush Killer Liberia," it said.

U.S. Resists Entreaties to Send Peacekeepers to Liberia

CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS / NY Times 22jul03

WASHINGTON, July 21 — The United Nations secretary general and West African countries implored the Bush administration today to send peacekeepers to Liberia as fighting intensified there and the American Embassy came under mortar fire.

But administration officials resisted the appeals, countering that Liberia's neighbors should act first in helping stabilize the country. The administration called on rebels and the government of President Charles G. Taylor to respect a cease-fire.

Even as they balked at taking the lead in peacekeeping, administration officials acted to strengthen the American security presence in Liberia. The Pentagon sent a security team to protect the United States Embassy compound, where fewer than 100 Americans remained. An apartment building in the embassy complex was hit by a mortar round, which officials described as "stray," wounding two; a second round exploded at an embassy annex, killing numerous war refugees, officials said.

In recent days, the Pentagon ordered about 4,500 sailors and marines to move closer to Liberia in preparation for possible peacekeeping or evacuation duty, officials said.

Administration policy makers are torn over how to proceed, if at all, in Liberia. Officials indicated after President Bush's five-day trip to Africa this month that he might be willing to send a peacekeeping force of limited scope and duration. Pentagon officials are the most resistant, while the State Department is more eager to find a solution.

Among the chief reasons cited for the ambivalence: The United States has no vital interest in Liberia; the military feels overextended in Iraq and elsewhere; the last African intervention, in Somalia, ended in a debacle; Pentagon officials, in particular, increasingly chafe at noncombat missions.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, pleaded for the United States to intercede "before it is too late" and the best opportunity vanishes. "I think we can really salvage the situation if troops were to be deployed urgently and promptly," Mr. Annan told reporters.

Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman, said today that the administration remained in close consultation with Mr. Annan and West African leaders who brokered a cease-fire, but he said no decision had been made to send troops.

Instead, Mr. Reeker strongly condemned the rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, for "their continued reckless and indiscriminate shelling" of the capital, Monrovia.

Advocates of American action said the administration's failure to lead in Liberia was unconscionable.

"There is a major humanitarian crisis on the horizon here," said Princeton N. Lyman, a former American ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa. "For the U.S. not to come in, I think, this would be a significant moral blot — right after the president's trip to Africa."

Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dispatched a three-ship amphibious group from its position off the Horn of Africa into the Mediterranean Sea. From there, it would take the vessels another 7 to 10 days to get to Liberia, officials said.

The amphibious group, led by the assault ship Iwo Jima, includes 2,000 marines and 2,500 soldiers. Only the marines, and perhaps only some of them, would probably go ashore as part of any American mission, the defense officials said.

The American reluctance to send even a token number of peacekeepers comes just weeks after Pentagon officials signaled that planning had begun for the deployment of 500 to 2,000 peacekeepers. Since then, however, the administration has faced growing difficulties in Iraq, sapping the appetite for a new undertaking of undetermined scope.

Some Africa experts say the administration is risking a historic chance to end the ruinous rebellion that surged in 2000 in a population exhausted by war. The disintegration of the cease-fire two weeks ago was an indication that time was running out, they said.

"A U.S. intervention at this point would be practical and possible and well received," said Joseph Siegle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, who spent years as a relief worker in Liberia.

James Phillips, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a research institution with ties to the White House, said he opposed sending troops to Liberia. The military, he said, is already overcommitted, with half the Army in Iraq, and training missions elsewhere.

"To undertake another peacekeeping operation would make things worse," he said. "There's going to be a very unsettled situation."

Liberia Fighting May Increase

GREG JAFFE / Wall Street Journal 22jul03

Calls for Action by U.S. Troops

Heavy fighting in Liberia is likely to increase calls for U.S. peacekeepers to move into the troubled West African country even as the situation makes it harder for President Bush to dispatch troops.

President Bush said Monday that he hadn't made a final decision on sending in U.S. forces. "We'll continue to monitor the situation very closely. We're working with the United Nations to get the cease-fire back in place," he told reporters. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan repeated his call for U.S. and West African troops.

No American peacekeepers, however, would enter the country unless another cease-fire was signed, U.S. officials said. With the U.S. already stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon doesn't want to commit large numbers of American soldiers to Liberia , or get caught between the two warring factions.

West African peacekeeping troops probably won't be ready to move into Liberia for at least another week, according to the initial findings of a Pentagon team that reviewed the forces. U.S. troops, if dispatched, would go in with the first wave of West Africans to provide logistical, communications and other support. They would also be expected to "exert a presence" in the capital of Monrovia by either guarding high-profile sites or taking on limited patrols inside Monrovia.

Officials said heavy fighting killed at least 60 people in Monrovia Monday as mortars barraged the city in a battle between rebels and the forces of Liberian President Charles Taylor. Shells fell on the U.S. Embassy and killed 25 of the thousands of people taking refuge within the embassy's residential compound.

As the fighting grew worse, 23 U.S. Embassy personnel, including four members of a military humanitarian-assistance survey team, were evacuated from the country. The rest of the embassy staff and the survey team, however, are staying for now.

Increasingly frustrated by U.S. inaction, angry Liberians lined up at least 18 bodies in the street outside the embassy, calling on officials inside to do something to help stop the fighting. As the conditions grew more perilous, U.S. officials said that an amphibious ready group, which could put about 1,300 Marines ashore, had been redirected from the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean to get closer to Liberia .

The Marines could be called ashore to evacuate the U.S. Embassy if the U.S. ambassador determines it is necessary, but it would take more than a week to get in position for such a move. Moving the Marines closer to Liberia also could signal to the rebels and pro-government troops that the U.S. is committed to sending in troops as soon as the fighting stops.

In the past few days, the U.S. has turned up the pressure on the rebels to cease fighting, warning them that if they seize power there will be no U.S. financial aid to help the war-ravaged country and no peacekeepers to prevent it from sliding back into chaos.

U.S. officials were still hopeful that a combination of public condemnation and the promise of assistance would be enough to get the rebels to stop fighting, allowing the cease-fire to take hold and the U.S. to once again press President Taylor to leave the country.

Liberian Rebels Resume Attacks

KARL VICK / Washington Post 22jul03

Defense Minister Reports More Than 600 Civilians Killed

MONROVIA, Liberia, July 21—Mortar fire rained on residential areas and killed at least 25 people huddled in a compound across the street from the U.S. Embassy today as rebels pushed their three-day advance into Liberia's capital. Angry Liberians lined up many of the mangled corpses on the street outside the embassy.

With reports of 60 to 90 civilians killed and more than 300 wounded, it was one of the bloodiest days of fighting in the three rebel attempts to take the capital in the past two months.

[Liberian Defense Minister Daniel Chea said more than 600 civilians had been killed as fighting continued for a fifth day on the outskirts of the capital, the Reuters news agency reported Tuesday. Chea said the soaring death toll, which he estimated to be six times higher than what aid workers in Monrovia have calculated, had thrown into doubt pledges by President Charles Taylor to quit once peacekeeping troops arrived.]

Liberians have waited anxiously for promised peacekeepers to arrive, and are especially eager to see U.S. troops deployed here. A group of 21 U.S. Marines landed by helicopter today to reinforce the embassy's security, while more Marines waited at a staging area near Freetown in neighboring Sierra Leone. After their arrival a shell landed in the embassy compound itself, damaging the commissary building, but no one was injured.

The shelling has been concentrated on the diplomatic neighborhood where tens of thousands seek refuge each time the fighting erupts. During a lull of several hours this morning, hundreds clogged the street outside the U.S. Embassy, milling idly at what had been the scene of demonstrations cheering the prospect of U.S. peacekeepers three weeks earlier.

This afternoon the scenes were of enraged Liberians. News photographs showed bodies lined up in front of the embassy, dragged from the residential compound across the street that had been hit with an 81mm shell.

"We're dying here," screamed some in the crowd, as two U.S. servicemen in camouflage watched from behind bulletproof glass, according to the Associated Press. One man held up a hastily scrawled sign: "Today G. Bush kill Liberia people."

Down the hill from the embassy, a small boy lay face-down in the grass—the victim of a blast just yards away, the AP reported. In a densely populated residential neighborhood, a shell hit a house, killing 18 people in one strike, emergency workers said at the scene.

The source of the shelling could not be determined with authority. But it has been a feature of all three assaults on Monrovia by Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), a rebel group opposed to President Charles Taylor.

"This is worse," said one aid worker. "Last time we still had security in Monrovia. Now the system has started to collapse. They are starting to carry wounded soldiers to the hospital by car. They used to use ambulances, and call in advance. Now it is only the militias."

More than 200 injured people arrived at the John F. Kennedy Hospital in pickup trucks, police cars and wheelbarrows, the AP reported. About 50 others were treated at a Red Cross trauma center and 112 at clinics set up by Doctors Without Borders.

The flow of casualties indicated that fighting was particularly heavy to the east of the city, where rebels Sunday began an effort to sweep to the base of the peninsula that holds the capital, relief workers said. The route leads to a key junction with the highway leading to Robertsfield airport, the main commercial airfield serving Monrovia. A smaller airfield designed for military use is located within Monrovia, near Taylor's residence.

Taylor has been indicted for crimes against humanity by a U.N.-backed court, and has promised to leave office and accept asylum in Nigeria as part of a peace agreement that also calls for international peacekeepers. President Bush has promised to supplement a West African force of several thousand, but has yet to announce whether he will authorize the participation of U.S. troops.

At a joint appearance in Texas with visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Bush noted that the Marine force had arrived to help provide security at the U.S. Embassy.

"We're concerned about our people in Liberia. We continue to monitor the situation very closely. We're working with the United Nations to effect policy necessary to get the cease-fire back in place," he said.

In Monrovia, hundreds of disappointed Liberians stood in the street, many asking when Marines would come to help them, the AP reported. "What we need aren't those that are just coming to mind American properties, but those who will be deployed on the ground to give us the feeling that peace is really coming," said Moses Smith, 32, who stood in a cluster of people following events on a radio, according to the report.

As the first shells exploded over central Monrovia on Saturday, sending thousands into panicked flight, a senior government official denounced international news coverage that had overlooked the rebels' conduct.

"I hope you can report to the world who the damn problem is and stop saying it's Taylor and that he should leave so these brutes can run the country," said Benoni Urey, head of Liberia's powerful maritime commission, which collects fees from shipping concerns that covet the country's flag of convenience.

"The world must take the responsibility for this onslaught that is going on right now," Urey said. "When you put an arms embargo on a country and we're attacked, what happens?"

The U.N. Security Council banned arms sales to Liberia and other warring parties in the region but Taylor has publicly defied the ban, citing a right to self-defense.

Analysts and diplomats dismiss LURD as a legitimate successor to a Taylor government. It is frequently described as a motley assortment of former Taylor loyalists supported by West African governments, especially Guinea.

The State Department criticized the rebel group for "reckless and indiscriminate shooting" and appealed to neighboring African countries to guard against weapons going to Liberia. "If we're to trust them in the future to participate in the democratic governance of Liberia, we need to be able to see them keep their commitments now," said spokesman Philip T. Reeker.

Reeker said the mortar at the main embassy compound did not cause any casualties but a local guard was injured in front of the embassy. Tom Masland, an American who is Newsweek's regional editor for Africa, was hit in the arm by shrapnel in Monrovia's port area.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Dan Hetlage, said 4,500 U.S. troops on three warships were being moved into the Mediterranean to be in a position for possible use in Liberia , the Reuters news agency reported.