Liberia In the Land of Blood and Tears

MONROVIA -- The murderous civil war in Liberia has reached so volatile a state that on my first day in Monrovia, the capital, I found myself on both sides of the fighting without ever having changed position; suddenly the struggle swirled around my companions and me and engulfed us. President Samuel K. Doe, the man whose ouster rebel forces sought when they began fighting 10 months ago, has been dead for six weeks, but violence, hunger and general chaos continue to hold Liberia in a bloody embrace. An estimated 10,000 Liberians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the war began -- and more are dying every day.

I went to Liberia at the invitation of rebel leader Charles Taylor, the man who last December launched the campaign to topple Doe, a former army master sergeant who had seized power a decade earlier. In January part of Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (N.P.F.L.) broke away and formed a separate faction led by Prince Yeduo Johnson, an army captain. Johnson and about 400 of his rebels captured, tortured and then killed Doe on Sept. 10, but about 1,000 of the slain President's followers still hold the executive mansion in Monrovia and are fighting on. A 6,000-man, five-nation West African peacekeeping force, strangely named the Economic Community Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), began to arrive in Liberia in August but has been unable to stop the shooting. In fact, it has become actively involved in the war, mounting, in conjunction with Prince Johnson's forces, air and ground attacks on Taylor and his rebels.

We arrived in Monrovia in the middle of the night aboard a creaky Fokker civilian plane flown by Burkina Faso air force pilots. Also aboard were four military advisers to Taylor's forces from Burkina Faso and two other journalists. When we touched down at Robertsfield, the national airport, the plane's window shades were pulled down by the crew, and the airport lights were doused as soon as the aircraft's engines were switched off.

We were taken to see "President" Taylor in his newly proclaimed capital, Gbarnga, a small town in central Liberia, then a four-hour drive from the fighting lines in Monrovia. Inside his headquarters, formerly a Doe country residence that is guarded by female soldiers, Taylor, 42, appeared wearing an ECOLOGY NOW T shirt, fatigue pants and a pistol in a shoulder holster. Despite setbacks suffered by his 10,000-strong forces in skirmishes with ECOMOG troops, he vowed that he would not give up the fight. "Look here," he said, pointing to a map of Liberia. "This is all ours -- except for this little piece called Monrovia, and we are going to keep on fighting as long as one foreign ECOMOG soldier remains on our soil." The damage inflicted on Liberia by ECOMOG artillery fire and aerial bombing, which is carried out by Nigerian air force planes, he claimed, amounts to $4.5 billion. "The Liberian people are going to be bitter against their neighbors for a long time," he continued. "They are finding it hard to accept being bombed by Nigerian planes."