Liberian Peace Proposal Excludes Taylor
By EDWARD HARRIS
Associated Press Writer
July 16, 2003, 2:08 PM EDT
ACCRA, Ghana -- An American-backed proposal at talks aimed at ending the
fighting in Liberia would set up an interim government in August without
Charles Taylor or the two leaders of the rebel groups seeking to oust
him, negotiators said Wednesday.
President Bush, who is considering a limited deployment of American
troops to war-torn Liberia said such a move would depend on Taylor
stepping down and leaving the country. Liberia was founded by freed U.S.
slaves.
The draft plan calls for the interim government to be inaugurated by
August 2 and for new elections to be held by October 2004. Elections
would be open to all parties.
A new elected government would be expected to be in place by early 2005,
the document said.
Lewis Brown, the senior government negotiator, said the proposal, one of
several under discussion at peace talks in Ghana, was authored by U.S.
government officials.
David Queen, a U.S. Embassy spokesman for Ghana, was shown the
three-page proposal and said he could not comment on whether or not it
was an American one.
Queen said that several U.S. officials had attended the talks and were
playing a facilitating role.
Brown said the government supports the proposal overall, but said small
changes would be needed to make it consistent with the Liberian
constitution, which stipulates that if the president steps down for any
reason, his vice president would assume power until the end of his term.
Brown said he foresees Liberian Vice President Moses Blah remaining in
office until January 2004, the end of what would have been Taylor's
term.
Charles Benny, a leader of one of the main rebel movements, Liberians
United for Reconciliation and Democracy, or LURD, rejected Blah taking
over until January 2004.
"(It is) completely unacceptable. We will never accept that," Benny
said.
Benny said he believed LURD might consider allowing Blah to take over
from Taylor as president, but just until an interim government was
established on Aug. 2, as called for in the proposal.
At the United Nations headquarters in New York, U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan said the world expected Taylor to honor his commitment to
step down and go to Nigeria.
Annan said the parties involved have reached an understanding that West
Africa will send a vanguard of between 1,000 and 1,500 troops to Liberia
and once they arrive Taylor would leave and U.S. and other
reinforcements would then join the West African force. In the long term,
a U.N. peacekeeping force would take over.
Negotiators representing the government and the two main rebel groups,
along with opposition parties and civic groups, are hoping to clinch a
deal in the coming days to coincide with the promised arrival of
peacekeeping troops in Liberia.
Liberian Army Gen. Benjamin Weaten urged Bush to make a decision quickly
to send help to Liberia.
"Our citizens are suffering and we want to ask the United States of
America to hurry up because everyone is waiting for Americans to be on
the ground," Weaten told reporters at the defense ministry in the
Liberian capital of Monrovia.
Fourteen years of intermittent conflict since 1989 has killed hundreds
of thousands in Liberia. Aid groups say virtually the whole population
has been displaced by fighting at one time or another.
Besides being surrounded by rebel forces, Taylor is under indictment by
a war crimes court in Sierra Leone on accusations that he supported a
brutal rebel movement there.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press
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