30 July: Foday Saybana Sankoh, the once-feared rebel leader
who plunged his country into a decade of brutal civil war,
died in hospital late Tuesday of natural causes. He was 65.
Sankoh had been in detention since May 2000, after his
bodyguards opened fire on a crowd of protesters outside his
Freetown. More than 20 people died in the incident. Sankoh
had been in poor health since August 2002, when he suffered
a stroke which left him partially paralyzed. Following his
indictment last March for war crimes and crimes against
humanity, he was transferred to the custody of Sierra
Leone's Special Court. His condition continued to
deteriorate, however, and in late March he was transferred
to the Choithram Hospital for observation and treatment. In
recent months, Sankoh was said to be in a catatonic state,
unable to care for himself or to respond to his
environment. The rebel leader, once known simply as "Papay"
to his thousands of admiring young followers, died in
hospital at 10:40 p.m. Tuesday.  A former corporal in the
Sierra Leone Army, Sankoh served with the 1960s-era U.N.
peacekeeping force in the Congo, and even did a brief
signals course in England. His military career ended
abruptly, however, when he was implicated in a coup attempt
against then-President Siaka Stevens. Cashiered from the
army, embittered and jobless after serving six years at
Pademba Road Prison, Sankoh made his living as a portrait
photographer in the eastern town of Segbwema. He later made
his way to Libya where, in the late 1980s, he is said to
have founded his rebel movement, the Revolutionary United
Front (RUF). It was while training in the Libyan camps that
Sankoh met another future rebel leader, now President of
Liberia Charles Taylor. Sankoh and his followers reportedly
fought alongside Taylor's NPFL in Liberia before launching
their own rebellion into eastern Sierra Leone in March
1991. Portrayed as fighting for Sierra Leone's dispossessed
rural population against a corrupt urban elite, Sankoh's
RUF soon acquired a reputation for unparalleled brutality,
often hacking off the limbs of those they believed to be
sympathetic to the government. In November 1996 Sankoh
signed a peace agreement in Abidjan, but soon abandoned it.
In early 1997 he travelled to Nigeria where he was detained
by the Nigerian authorities on weapons charges. Following
the military coup in May 1997, Sankoh was made the nominal
vice chairman of the AFRC, and ordered his followers to
join the junta. Following the AFRC's ouster in 1998 the
Nigerian authorities sent him back to Freetown, where he
was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. In March
1999, following the bloody rebel attack on Freetown, he was
released and sent to Togo to negotiate a ceasefire and
later a peace accord which would gave him control of a
commission overseeing the country's mineral resources and
the protocol rank of vice president. He returned to
Freetown in December 1999, but his cooperation with the
government lasted barely five months. Court officials said
Tuesday there would be a post mortem to establish the exact
cause of death.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has asked the
Security Council to approve the immediate deployment of
Nigerian peacekeepers to Liberia, using logistics from
UNAMSIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone. In a
letter to the Council on Tuesday, Annan said he needed a
mandate to speed up the transfer of one, and possibly two,
battalions from Sierra Leone to Liberia. Annan asked the
Council to give UNAMSIL "the necessary mandate to use its
resources to provide full support for the deployment and
sustainment" of a vanguard peacekeeping force from the West
African regional body ECOWAS. In Monrovia, the Liberian
government rejected a LURD ceasefire which would have left
the rebel group in control of the capital city's port.
Rebel leaders said they would pull back to Freeport to
await the arrival of West African peacekeepers, and then
withdraw beyond the Po River. "(LURD) must release their
stranglehold on the city and that means withdrawing to the
positions they held prior to the June 17 ceasefire
agreement," Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Lewis
Brown told the Reuters news agency in Accra. Despite LURD's
announcement of a unilateral ceasefire, fighting between
government and rebel forces continued in the capital
Tuesday. In the east, government troops battled to
recapture the port city of Buchanan, which was overrun by
MODEL rebel forces on Monday. Because of the rebel attacks,
Liberian President Charles Taylor is reportedly
reconsidering his pledge to step down and leave the
country. Earlier this month, Taylor accepted an offer of
asylum in Nigeria which would shield him from war crimes
charges by the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Taylor insisted he would remain on until peacekeepers
arrived in his country. Now, according to the Reuters news
agency, his spokesman says he may decide not to leave after
all. "We are of a different opinion now in the government
about the validity of the overtures of the president to
step down," Vaani Passawe said. "So if you start hearing us
say differently, you shouldn't be surprised." Passawe said
Taylor's offer to go into exile had been interpreted by the
rebels as a sign of weakness. "In fact, it has escalated
the war," he said.

29 July: The leader of Liberia's largest rebel group said
Tuesday his troops would break off their attack on Monrovia
and declare a unilateral ceasefire to allow West African
peacekeepers to intervene in the war-torn country. "We will
stop fighting until the peacekeepers arrive, unless
attacked by Taylor's forces," LURD leader Sekou Conneh
(pictured left) was quoted as saying. According to news
services, the rebels said they would pull back to Freeport,
where the peacekeepers are expected to deploy. Once the
force arrives, they would withdraw beyond the Po River,
about seven miles from the city. The announcement came
hours after Nigerian Foreign Minister Oluyemi Adeniji
(right) suggested in a BBC interview that no peacekeepers
would be sent until the fighting stopped and there was a
peace to keep. "Let them stop the fighting now," Adeniji
said. "Usually before you include peacekeepers into any
situation, fighting stops, and then the peacekeepers will
go in and make sure they separate the combatants to make
sure to make sure that the ceasefire is not violated, and
if violated, to be able to identify who's responsible for
the violation." Adeniji, who until recently served as the
United Nations Secretary-General's Special Representative
in Sierra Leone, said there was also the question of
logistics and resources for the peacekeepers, which are
initially expected to be drawn from two Nigerian
battalions. "It's not enough for Nigeria to designate
troops, but these troops will have to make sure are going
to be properly supported," he said, adding: "That's where
the international community comes in."

Fighting around the Liberian capital Monrovia this weekend
engulfed the Samukai refugee camp, which had been home to
more than 3,500 Sierra Leonean refugees, a spokesman for
the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Tuesday.
UNHCR staff said large numbers of the refugees fled the
camp ahead of a rebel advance. Other reports, however,
allege that the rebels were expecting a government
counter-attack in the area, and advised the refugees and
Liberian residents to leave the area. Some of the refugees
at Samukai had been registered for an emergency sea
evacuation to Sierra Leone on July 20. Plans to take a
fifth shipload of evacuees to Sierra Leone had to be put on
hold when the latest round of fighting which broke out on
July 18 prevented the ship, the MV Overbeck, from docking
in Monrovia. The U.N.-chartered ship is standing by in
Freetown to resume evacuations once the security situation
allows. In its first four voyages, the Overbeck conducted
1,250 refugees to safety in Sierra Leone.

West African security chiefs meeting in the Ghanaian
capital Accra say it is unlikely that regional peacekeeping
troops will be deployed immediately in Liberia, the BBC
reported. Two Nigerian infantry battalions, one just
finishing a tour of duty with the U.N. peacekeeping force
in Sierra Leone, had been tapped to be the vanguard of the
new ECOWAS force, ECOMIL. Officials said, however, that the
fighting between Liberian government and rebel forces was
preventing the regional body from sending even a
reconnaissance mission. MODEL rebels captured the Liberian
port city of Buchanan Monday, while LURD overran the
government stronghold of Gbarnga and continued their attack
Monrovia. Government forces were said to be mounting
counter-attacks on Tuesday in an effort to retake the two
towns. In London, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told
the BBC his country was ready to send peacekeepers to
Liberia, but that Nigeria lacked the means to finance a
peacekeeping operation alone. "It is our problem, but it is
not our problem alone," he said. "It is in fact Africa's
problem and it is a world problem...(the troops) are not
there because we haven't got the capacity to do all that is
necessary, and we made that clear." Obasanjo said twelve
years of peacekeeping efforts in Liberia and Sierra Leone
had cost his country $12 billion and more than 1,000
Nigerian lives. A peacekeeping force in Liberia is expected
to cost over $100 million, and the Obasanjo said that so
far no country had stepped forward with the necessary
funds. "What we are saying is give us adequate material and
logistic support and we will do the job," he said. "We have
two battalions of over 1,500 ready to go in. We cannot do
that alone."



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