Johannesburg — West African special envoys flew into the Liberian capital of Monrovia on Friday for talks with President Charles Taylor, only to be told that he was out of town. The embattled Liberian leader was reported to have traveled unannounced to one of the battlefronts, where he was apparently "commanding the troops".
Taylor, who has agreed to step down and has been asked by his regional counterparts to leave by Thursday, was said to have left Monrovia unexpectedly for Liberia's second town, Buchanan, a strategic port city which was seized by rebels earlier this week but control of which is now uncertain.
Liberian Defence Minister Daniel Chea told the BBC late Friday that Taylor was indeed in Buchanan, directing the military action at the front. Chea explained that a breakdown in protocol had led to Taylor's absence from Monrovia, which meant he had missed the meeting with the West African delegation. The minister claimed that the president was unaware that the envoys were due in the city.
Some observers doubted this explanation, speculating that President Taylor was still in Monrovia and had snubbed the regional envoys.
Ghana's foreign minister, Nana Akufo-Addo, and Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the executive-secretary of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), arrived in Monrovia expecting to brief Taylor on an extraordinary regional summit in Ghana on Thursday, joined by the foreign ministers of Nigeria and Togo.
West African heads of state announced after their meeting that an initial contingent of regional peacekeepers was to begin deployment in Liberia on Monday, after delay and wrangling over who would finance the peacekeeping operation.
West African military officials already in Monrovia, preparing the arrival of the peacekeepers, announced that the first 300 Nigerian troops should arrive on Monday, in line with the summit decisions. "I have told them to get the men ready to deploy on Monday. I'm coming in on Monday and when I come in on Monday it's business," Brigadier-General Festus Okonkwo, the Nigerian commander of the peacekeeping force, told journalists in Monrovia.
The Ecowas summit also decided that Taylor must leave Liberia by Thursday, to take up an offer of asylum in Nigeria, once the troops arrived. "The decision was very clear in its plain meaning: we will put in the troops on Monday. We expect him to be able to leave within three days. He has made public undertakings, and that's what the leaders of the region expect him to do," Chambas told reporters, adding: "It's not a coup d'etat, it's a constitutional change of power".
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Akufo-Addo said the team would stay in Monrovia until the meeting with Taylor, which is now expected to take place on Saturday.
For the past two weeks, there have been fierce battles in and around Monrovia between rebels from the main armed faction, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd), and loyalist Taylor troops. Hundreds of people are reported to have been killed and hundreds of others wounded.
After a brief lull in the fighting on Thursday, bloody clashes erupted again on Friday. Aid workers reported that four children and five adults were killed when a mortar hit a private home in a crowded neighbourhood of the city.
A smaller rebel group, known as the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model) launched a surprise attack on Buchanan earlier this week.
Taylor is facing charges of war crimes across the border in Sierra Leone and pressure from the United States, the United Nations and others to leave power, to allow for a peaceful settlement to the civil war in Liberia.
As recently as last Saturday he again pledged to step down in the interests of the people of Liberia. But Taylor is known to be a wily political survivor and, although he appears to be boxed into a corner, many observers have predicted that he would fight compulsory exile to the last and cling onto power for as long as he could.
