Liberia's warring parties meet for cease-fire talks

AKOSOMBO, Ghana -- Liberia's warring parties tried to hammer out details of a cease-fire Friday, while medics struggled to treat growing numbers of casualties in Liberia's rebel-besieged capital. Government officials said days of fighting have left at least 300 dead.

"We are making very good progress. We are hopeful of signing a cease fire document tomorrow," aid Mohamed Ibn Chambas, executive secretary of the regional bloc arranging the peace conference in Akosombo, 75 miles northeast of Ghana's capital, Accra.

Liberia's main insurgency group has surrounded Monrovia, the last stronghold of Charles Taylor, in its strongest drive yet to drive the warlord turned president from power.

In an unexplained reversal, Taylor reinstated his former vice president, Moses Blah, Taylor's spokesman, Varney Tasawe, said. Taylor fired and arrested Blah last week to thwart what Taylor called a coup attempt.

The guns have been silent outside Monrovia since Tuesday, but Liberians fear a bloody battle for the city of 1 million, which was repeatedly overrun during seven years of factional fighting that ended in 1996. The current war started in 1999.

The fighting on Monrovia's outskirts have driven tens of thousands into the city center. Nearly 400 people have been treated at the city's hospital overflowing with wounded, said chief medical officer, Mohamed Sheriff. "The situation here is serious," he said.

Medical students and nurses' aides volunteered alongside doctors to treat scores of gunshot wounds at the John F. Kennedy hospital, the largest in the west African nation.

The dead lay outside the city.

"Looking at the number of bodies we have picked up and those still not picked up yet, the number of people killed could be between 300 and 400," Liberia's Health Minister Peter Coleman said.

The European Union said Friday it was concerned over the threat of renewed fighting in Liberia called all the warring parties to immediately cease hostilities and seek a negotiated solution.

Taylor has said peace is impossible unless a U.N.-backed tribunal in Sierra Leone lifts an indictment against him for war crimes.

But the EU said in a statement in Athens, Greece, that the indictment against Taylor should not impede the peace efforts in Ghana.

Security forces in Monrovia are authorized to shoot looters on sight, Assistant Defense Minister Philipbert Brown said. The World Food Program said it began distributing emergency food rations to 17,000 people who have fled into central Monrovia.

There also are fears of outbreaks of diseases like measles and diarrhea among the thousands of displaced people seeking refuge at Monrovia's soccer stadium, World Health Organization spokeswoman Christine McNab said in Geneva.