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Renewed fighting has endangered more than a million in Liberia, a country beset by poverty and conflict. Mercy Corps operates a community development program that promotes peace, development and stability. Photo: Mario Tedo/Mercy Corps
As fighting between government troops and rebel factions intensifies in the West African country of Liberia, Northwest-based relief agency Mercy Corps staffers have been evacuated to safety.
Mercy Corps Country Director Denise Barrett, a Seattle resident and the lone American in the group, arrived in Washington D.C. late this afternoon, after a hurried exit from the Monrovia office Friday. Efforts to close the office were cut short by the increasing nearness of the fighting.
Barrett sought assistance at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, helicoptered to Sierra Leone, and then flew back to U.S. after rebels battling President Charles Taylor’s government pressed in on the capital, heightening concerns about a deadly siege of the city.
Two European staffers, Brian Barber and Manivone Rasphone, headed to safety at the European Union Compound in Monrovia, and are now aboard a vessel bound for Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
The situation in Monrovia deteriorated rapidly at the end of last week after the sudden return of President Taylor from peace talks in Ghana. The announcement of his indictment for war crimes while he attended the peace negotiations prompted his quick return to Liberia and led to an escalation in the conflict.
Mercy Corps launched a $12 million US Agency for International Development-funded civil society/democratic governance programs in Liberia in September of 2002, amid the latest war which has uprooted an estimated 1.4 million people. Liberia’s economy has collapsed, with more than 80 percent of the population now unemployed. The “dry season” in Liberia marked renewed fighting, tearing hundreds of thousands of farmers away from their only source of livelihood, subsistence farming.
Urgent calls for a ceasefire, issued by many nations, have so far gone unheeded.
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