What does the future hold for the US in Liberia?

Well we have 2,300 Marines enroute to Liberia, they will be there this weekend. I was curious as to the general opinion of this mission, I think the Bush administration is hoping their presence alone will cause the rebels to back down. This is unlikely, so does it look like we are about to enter a quagmire or a quick overwhelming victory in Africa?

U.S. Warships to Reach Liberia Coast by Saturday
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The lead ships in a U.S. Navy Amphibious Ready Group are expected to arrive off the coast of Liberia by Saturday, but no decision has been made on whether to put any of the 2,300 Marines aboard on the ground in the West African country, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

A senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States will have "forces closer to Liberia available for whatever purpose the president may decide may be necessary." The official added that "at the moment, there's still some assessments going on" by U.S. teams in the region.

West African leaders approved on Thursday a peacekeeping mission to Liberia, calling for troops to enter the country by Monday. The Economic Community of West African States said it had agreed that President Charles Taylor, indicted for war crimes in Sierra Leone by a U.N.-backed court, would depart Liberia within three days of the peacekeepers' arrival.

President Bush said on Wednesday that the United States "will be there to help ECOWAS" if Taylor is gone and a cease-fire is in place, but Bush administration officials have provided few concrete details about the nature of the U.S. involvement.

Defense officials said the helicopter carrier USS Iwo Jima, leading the Amphibious Ready Group, and the USS Carter Hall were sailing in the eastern Atlantic and were expected to arrive by Saturday. The third ship in the group, the USS Nashville, was expected to arrive in the middle of next week, the officials said. The ships are carrying about 2,300 U.S. Marines. But asked whether the administration had decided to put U.S. Marines on the ground in Liberia, the senior defense official said, "There is no decision yet."

At the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher said, "The president has indicated we will support the effort that the West Africans are making." Boucher added that "the United States will decide during the course of this process ... how we can support them, and whether we need to do that with military forces." He said the United States already has "put up $10 million that will go in the form of a contract for logistics support." The peacekeeping operation is intended to stabilize Liberia, a nation founded in the 19th century by freed slaves from the United States, after 14 years of civil war.

 

I'm surprised there is not more interest in the first major US military mission in Africa since Somalia...

Should U.S. Troops Go to Liberia?

Compiled From Washington Post Staff Reports
Friday, August 1, 2003

What is going on in Liberia?

President Bush is considering a request from U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan that the U.S. provide up to 2,000 troops for a peacekeeping mission to the West African country. A country of 3 million people, Liberia has been wracked by civil war for 13 years. Bush has said he will send U.S. troops only after President Charles Taylor, indicted by an international war-crimes court in Sierra Leone, leaves the country.

On July 30, the United States introduced a draft resolution to the Security Council to authorize the creation of a multinational force to intervene in Liberia for less than two months to help end civil war, restore humanitarian assistance and prepare the ground for a U.N. peacekeeping mission. The next day, leaders of the Economic Community of West African States said they will supply 3,250 soldiers for a Nigerian led peacekeeping force to arrive in Liberia on Monday and Annan has said the U.N. will pick up the tab. The West African leaders also said that Taylor would leave the country for exile in Nigeria three days later.

There are lots of civil wars in the world. Why should U.S. troops go to Liberia?

In early July, Bush cited the close historical ties between the United States and Liberia, which was founded in 1847 as a homeland for freed American slaves. About five percent of the population is descended from these African-Americans. Bush said this "unique history" has created "a certain sense of expectations" about the U.S. role in restoring stability to the country.

Why now?

A combination of factors.
The civil war is worsening. Taylor, a military leader whose forces are known for repeated human rights violations, is under siege from rebel forces determined to drive him from power. Annan wants the U.S. to act to prevent a bloodbath in the Liberian capital of Monrovia.

The Bush administration now sees a vital U.S. interest in restoring a semblance of order to Liberia. National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice told the Post recently that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks showed that "failed states" can spawn "so much instability that you begin to see greater sources of terrorism."

A third factor was political. Annan called for U.S. involvement on the eve of Bush's July 8-12 trip to Africa. For Bush to rule out sending U.S. troops would have invited questions and criticism during a trip intended to highlight U.S. efforts to combat HIV-AIDS and promote economic development.

Who is Charles Taylor and why does the U.S. want him to go?

Taylor, who graduated from Bentley College in Massachusetts in the 1970s, has long been at the center of West African violence. He began fighting for power in Liberia in 1989 and was elected president in 1997. In pursuit of wealth, he supported a vicious rebel insurgency in neighboring Sierra Leone. A U.N.-appointed prosecutor has indicted Taylor, alleging he led an international joint criminal enterprise that reaped millions of dollars in profits from the illicit sale of diamonds mined by his troops. The charges against him include ordering murder, rape, abduction, the recruitment and use of child soldiers and the mutilation of thousands of people by hacking off their arms and legs. Taylor has agreed in principle to leave the country for Nigeria where he would live in exile but he has failed to keep his word in the past and Taylor does not want to face a war-crimes trial.

What would the U.S. role be?

In early July, the United States sent a 32-person military team to Liberia to conduct a "humanitarian assessment" which could lead to a military deployment. On July 21, violence in Monrovia prompted the U.S. to send additional Marines from Germany to the Liberian capital to protect the embassy.

Bush has ordered three U.S. warships to the Liberian coast, but he has not said whether the Marines aboard them will serve as peacekeepers or merely provide logistical support.

Under a plan proposed by Annan, the United States would commit about 2,000 troops, probably Marines, to a peace force that would also include 3,000 other troops, mainly from West African countries. The force would stay in Liberia for a limited period to enforce a ceasefire between the Taylor government and rebels.

Can the U.S. military afford to send troops to Liberia while occupying Iraq?

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld initially opposed intervening in Liberia. He cited military operations in Iraq where the U.S. has 150,000 soldiers, Afghanistan (11,500 soldiers) and the Balkans (4,050 soldiers). Pentagon officials say that Rumsfeld fell into line after Bush made clear that some limited military intervention would be necessary.

What do Liberians think?

The leaders of the Liberian government and rebel forces might oppose the foreign troops, who would cut into their wealth and power. But most people would probably be supportive. When a U.S. military assessment team visited Liberia on July 9, 2003, The Post's Karl Vick reported, "residents and refugees burst into song and rambunctious applause at every stop. Mothers led chants of 'No more war! We want peace,' men praised President Bush and children clutched the visitors' hands."

This report is based on reporting from Post correspondents Karl Vick, Michael Dobbs, and Douglas Farah.


© 2003 Washingtonpost

 

This may be the scariest thing the peace-keepers have to face in Liberia, don't ask don't tell...

Scare Tactics
Why are Liberian soldiers wearing fright wigs?
By Mark Scheffler

Bewigged fighter sends otherworldly message

Few things exemplify the chaos of Liberia more than the sight of doped-up, AK-47-wielding 15-year-olds roaming the streets decked out in fright wigs and tattered wedding gowns. Indeed, some of the more fully accessorized soldiers in Charles Taylor's militia even tote dainty purses and don feather boas. Why did this practice begin and what is the logic behind it?

The cross-dressing combatants blipped onto the Western press's radar screen right around the time the Liberian Civil War started on Christmas Eve in 1989. During Taylor's rebel siege on Monrovia in the '90s, his band of dolled-up marauders—aka the National Patriotic Front of Liberia—put on one of the most disturbing horror shows the planet has ever seen. Between 1989 and 1997, 150,000 Liberians were murdered, countless others were mutilated, and 25,000 women and girls were raped. The NPFL's shock-and-awe antics were apparent from the very start of the conflict. In an essay in Liberian Studies Journal, an administrator at Cuttington University College tells a story of Taylor's forces storming the rural campus during the initial stages of the war in "wedding [dresses], wigs, commencement gowns from high schools and several forms of 'voodoo' regalia. … [They] believed they could not be killed in battle."


According to the soldiers themselves, cross-dressing is a military mind game, a tactic that instills fear in their rivals. It also makes the soldiers feel more invincible. This belief is founded on a regional superstition which holds that soldiers can "confuse the enemy's bullets" by assuming two identities simultaneously. Though the accoutrements and garb look bizarre to Western eyes, they are, in a sense, variations on the camouflage uniforms and face paint American soldiers use to bolster their sense of invisibility (and, therefore, immunity) during combat. Since flak jackets or infrared goggles aren't available to the destitute Liberian fighters, they opt for evening gowns and frilly blouses.

The cross-dressing "dual identity" isn't just a source of battlefield bravado, though. Cross-dressing has deep historical roots in West African rites-of-passage rituals involving "medicine men" who would recommend wearing masks, talismans, and bush attire as a means of obtaining mystical powers. Rebels dressed in gowns and wigs and adorned with bones, leaves, and other "forest culture" trappings are practicing a modern variation on this technique of using symbolic "clothing" to access sources of power far stronger than their own. And in common Liberian initiation rituals—which exist in memory throughout the country, if not always in practice—a boy's passage to adulthood is symbolically represented by the donning of female garb. He must first pass through a dangerous indeterminate zone between male and female identity before finally becoming a man. A soldier dressed in women's clothes—or Halloween masks, or shower caps, etc.—on the battlefield is essentially asserting that he's in a volatile in-between state. The message it sends to other soldiers is, "Don't mess with me, I'm dangerous."

Liberia's adult warlords appropriated and updated these rites-of-passage rituals in order to form tight-knit proxy fighting forces. The strongmen persuaded impoverished youths to join their battalion by offering them the chance to be part of a secret society and attain supernatural powers. In a country where the young had few if any options, this was seen as an opportunity to "be somebody."

After Charles Taylor's Cuttington University attack, other offshoot Liberian militias vying to control the country embarked upon similar gender-bending rampages. One of the more notorious henchmen of the era was Joshua Milton Blahyi, a commander whose nom de guerre was "General Butt Naked." Hired for his ferocity by rebel leader and Taylor contemporary Roosevelt Johnson, his "Butt Naked Battalion" consisted of drug-fueled teens who went into battle in flowing dresses and colorful wigs. The general himself reportedly wore only laced-up boots and his weapon.

Not surprisingly, these troops became poster children for the war. Dressed in gowns and shower caps and "fortified by amphetamines, mar1juana and palm wine [they] sashayed irresistibly for photographers," writes Bill Berkely in The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa. "Liberia's fifteen minutes of infamy seemed to spring full-blown out of the most sensational Western images of Darkest Africa."

Today, some 14 years after Taylor's troops first began their march toward Monrovia, Blahyi has put his clothes back on and supposedly found God. Prince Y. Johnson*, who tortured former Liberian president Samuel K. Doe to death in 1990 and recorded it on video, is talking about returning from exile in Nigeria with a promise to solve problems with "elections, not guns" once Taylor is gone. And Taylor himself is sitting in his Monrovian compound being shelled by new bands of rebels wearing bathrobes.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086490/

 

Charles Taylor leaves as requested, Monrovia falls farther into chaos--US forced to send in "quick reaction" troops. And so it begins...?

US to Send Marine 'Quick Reaction' Troops to Liberia
By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States plans to send about 200 Marines into Liberia from warships in the next few days, including a "quick reaction" force to back West African peacekeeping troops in Monrovia, the Pentagon (news - web sites) said on Wednesday.
Marine AV-8B Harrier attack jets and helicopters will also be sent from the ships to aid and watch over movement of Nigerian peacekeepers from the airport to the seaport in Liberia's capital after rebel forces leave the city on Thursday, senior defense officials told reporters.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Norton Schwartz, director of operations for the U.S. military's Joint Staff, said the approximately 200 Marines would include a reaction force of 150 to be based temporarily in Monrovia.

"It is a quick reaction capability if something unexpected happens in respect to an ECOMIL unit," he said of the military peacekeepers from the Economic Community of West African States, known as ECOWAS.

A senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified, said the U.S. troops could begin moving in when the rebels left the city as promised and were expected to be in place in the next four days.

Schwartz told a Pentagon briefing that about 50 U.S. military engineers and communications troops would be included in the 200 Marines to help the Nigerians prepare the seaport to receive humanitarian aid in the civil war-ravaged capital. He said a small team of 10 to 12 elite Navy SEAL frogmen had begun assessing underwater approaches to the seaport to make sure no debris and obstacles interfere with the expected arrival of a World Food Program vessel in the days ahead.

The U.S. force, to be sent from among about 2,300 Marines on three warships offshore, would be in addition to about 100 American troops already in Liberia guarding the U.S. Embassy and communicating with more than 746 Nigerian peacekeepers. Hundreds more Nigerian troops are expected to begin arriving in Liberia this weekend, Pentagon officials said.

Liberian rebels pledged on Tuesday to withdraw from Monrovia, the capital of the West African country, one day after Charles Taylor quit as president and went into exile under international pressure.


The United States is wary of deep involvement in Liberia given commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Memories also live on of a bloody debacle in Somalia a decade ago -- the last major U.S. military involvement in Africa.

President Bush again emphasized to reporters on Wednesday during a vacation in Texas that the U.S. force was off Liberia only to provide support for African peacekeepers and facilitate the movement of humanitarian aid into Liberia.

Schwartz and Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita stressed at the Pentagon briefing that there was currently no fighting in Monrovia and that the quick reaction force was strictly to back up the Nigerians in case of trouble.

On Wednesday, Liberians stormed Monrovia's port to grab food as rebel fighters packed up to hand over control to U.S.-backed West African peacekeepers.

The rebels have promised to pull out of the port on Thursday to allow food shipments to hundreds of thousands of famished people in a city where recent fighting left 2,000 dead -- the latest bloody bout in nearly 14 years of strife.

 

I can't believe this is this first comment about the drugged out Liberian drag queen voodoo warriors...

 

Well so far so good, I hope everything continues to go as smoothly as possible. It's a part of the world few of us can understand, but it seems the Liberians are desperate for fair and just leaders and ready for the sacrifices they must make for peace. I hope the current mission is taking the Liberian nation in that direction-- only time will tell.

Peace Deal Offers New Hope to War-Wrecked Liberia
By Silvia Aloisi

MONROVIA (Reuters) - A peace deal signed by Liberia (news - web sites)'s government and rebel factions offered new hope to the broken West African country on Tuesday of an end to nearly 14 years of savage bloodshed.

The deal in Ghana between President Moses Blah's government and rebels holding more than three-quarters of the country came a week after pariah leader Charles Taylor flew into exile.

Under the deal, Blah will step down in October for a chairman of an interim government to guide Liberia to elections by 2005. The chairman, who will not come from any of the warring factions, is expected to be picked this week.

The rebels, Blah's government, opposition parties and civil society groups will share jobs in the cabinet and parliament.

It came as welcome relief on the streets of Monrovia, where 2,000 people died in the most recent spell of blood-letting before the deployment of West African peacekeepers, backed by U.S. Marines.

"This country has not been in peace since as long as I can remember," said 38-year old Sanfo Massaquoi, putting his arm protectively around his eight-year-old daughter. "I hope there is going to be peace, so I can find a job and make a living."

Liberians have known little but strife since Taylor launched a war to end dictatorship in 1989. After some 200,000 deaths, he won 1997 elections, but his former foes barely waited before starting a new insurrection.

REGIONAL PERIL
Meanwhile, chaos spread to neighboring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast amid fears it could destroy the entire region.

"Liberians must now allow the love of country to override the love of power," Ghana's President John Kufuor admonished Liberia's political leaders after the signing ceremony on Monday.

"You should return to Liberia and treat your country like a cherished but sick baby that should be cared for with love."

The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel faction and a smaller group known as Model have said their war is over and they would bee prepared to disarm once a capable international force was in place.

But the government accused rebels of attacking outside Monrovia right up to the signing of the agreement, and Liberians are still wary of declaring peace prematurely.

About 1,500 Nigerian troops are already deployed, but the number of West African peacekeepers should double. The current force is eventually meant to become a U.N. peacekeeping mission.

The United States also has three warships sitting off a country that was founded by freed American slaves. It has sent ashore up to 200 Marines from a 2,300-strong task force as well as mounting patrols with helicopters and jet fighters.

But President Bush (news - web sites) said U.S. troops would be out of Liberia by October 1 after a limited mission to help humanitarian aid reach the devastated country.

"We've got U.N. blue helmeted troops ready to replace our limited number of troops," Bush told Armed Forces Radio and Television in an interview.