Rebels capture port, second-largest city

MONROVIA, Liberia -- Rebels captured Liberia's refugee-choked second-largest city Monday, defeating President Charles Taylor's embattled forces on a new front and depriving him of his last significant port outside the besieged capital.

The capture of the strategic city of Buchanan, 60 miles southeast of Monrovia, the capital, came as deliberations on a peace mission for the West African nation showed no sign of progress.

Gen. Benjamin Yeaten, a leading government commander, confirmed that Buchanan fell to fighters from Liberia's second rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, by nightfall.

Yeaten said government troops remained on the outskirts of the city and were planning a counterattack.

Taylor's forces took off running as rebels advanced into Buchanan, said John Mensah, a resident reached by telephone there, who added the rebels were "now in complete control of Buchanan."

During the rebel takeover, the Buchanan office of the international humanitarian group Merlin was looted, according to Merlin office workers in the capital.

"Taylor must go," said Joe Wylie, spokesman for the leading rebel movement, saying only international "whining about civilian casualties" was stopping insurgents from a final push to topple the Liberian leader.

"He's getting weaker and weaker," Wylie said. "He should not face us in a final military showdown that will just take lives."

Rebel forces now hold more than 60 percent of Liberia.

, grinding down Taylor's forces in their three-year battle to oust him.

The Movement for Democracy in Liberia, which until recently had largely heeded cease-fire pledges, claimed Taylor's forces had provoked the offensive on Buchanan with attacks on rebel positions outside the city in recent days.

Rebel official Boi Bleaju Boi pledged insurgents would open the southeastern city's port up to peace forces, should they choose to land there.

Trying to escape

Tens of thousands of refugees from the capital in recent days had flooded east into Buchanan, desperate to escape the shelling, grenade blasts and machine-gun fire of Monrovia.

On Monday, many took flight again, picking their way back along the coast toward Monrovia.

Liberian Defense Minister Daniel Chea had rushed overnight to the developing eastern front, which brings the smaller, but better-armed and better-disciplined second rebel movement into active battle against Taylor's already stretched-thin forces.

Chea, contacted by telephone, said that rebels of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy had also taken the northern town of Gbarnga, Taylor's base during a ruinous 7-year civil war that Taylor launched in 1989.

Fighting in Liberia often sees back-and-forth battles for towns, with one side capturing a community, then retreating.

Taylor, a former warlord behind 14 years of nearly constant conflict in once-prosperous Liberia, is holed up in his seaside mansion in Monrovia.

His forces in the capital are battling to turn back rebel drives toward downtown, the heart of Taylor's government.

Rebels hold the capital's port, and with it food and vital aid for the desperate city of more than 1.3 million and its surrounding refugee camps.

Embattled Monrovia

Monrovia's port reverberated with machine gun fire and grenade blasts Monday as government forces fought off two rebel pushes over bridges linking the port to downtown, Yeaten said.

Government fighters claimed to be back in control Monday of a northern capital suburb around one span, Stockton Bridge, after rebels gained a foothold on Monrovia's mainland over the weekend. Residents trickled out, with many uncertain whether to stay or run.

"Some of us thought our days on Earth had ended," said street evangelist Jenkins Nagbe, clutching a Bible in one hand, a plastic bucket of his belongings in the other.

Near the port, a rocket fired by government forces from a high building fell short. Crashing into the bedroom of a home, it wounded eight people inside, aid workers said.

Bombardments have killed hundreds of civilians since the latest rebel siege of the capital began July 19.

The rebel forces are allegedly backed by neighboring Guinea and Ivory Coast, who blame Taylor for cross-border attacks that threaten their own stability.

Reopening of hostilities on the second front came with military and diplomatic representatives of West African nations, the United Nations and the United States meeting in Accra, Ghana, for another day of talks on a peace force for Liberia.

West Africans have promised such a mission since soon after rebels launched their siege of the capital in early June.

The U.S. role

The United States, which oversaw Liberia's 19th century founding by freed American slaves, has pledged support.

It insists Liberia's neighbors and the United Nations must take the lead.

President Bush on Friday ordered troops to take up position off Liberia's Atlantic coast in readiness for any peace mission.

Disputes over funding have helped slow deployment, however, with debt-strapped Nigeria -- West Africa's military power -- asking for more financial assistance from the United States.

Nigerian Brig Gen. Festus Okwonkwo, who would oversee any Nigerian mission, called deployment this week "unlikely" as he went into meetings with representatives of other West African countries, U.N. peacekeeping operations and the U.S. military's European Command.

Okwonkwo said the United States was promising only logistical assistance and support at Monrovia's port. He didn't elaborate.

Under daily shelling, Monrovia's people speak of rescue with increasing despair.

"We are hoping that the peacekeeping forces are coming this week to relieve us of all this misery," said the Rev. Franklin Holt, president of the capital's downtown Monrovia College, where up to 2,000 people have taken shelter in the campus' concrete buildings.

"They are very late," Holt said of the peacekeepers, as fresh mortar blasts rocked downtown. "Extremely late."