Word: ecomog
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Later we moved by car and then by foot into Monrovia to see how far ECOMOG troops on the ground had advanced behind their air and artillery attacks. We were walking past a small airport called Spriggs Payne, held that morning by Taylor's rebels, when we suddenly discovered ourselves, with our N.P.F.L. bodyguard, behind ECOMOG lines. A group of Guinean and Ghanaian soldiers ordered us to accompany them to their base camp just west of Spriggs Payne. "Look what we've got!" shouted one. "Taylor's writers -- and we got us a rebel!" As more ECOMOG soldiers gathered...
Eventually the firing stopped. After an hour of high tension, the captain ordered us taken to ECOMOG headquarters in the Free Port area of Monrovia. There, for the next day and a half, together and separately, we were politely interrogated by a team of ECOMOG military police about where we had come from and what we had seen. We slept for two nights on the floor of the M.P. headquarters, ate military rations and were given soap and buckets of water to wash with...
...located in an office building near the harbor. Parked outside was the late President Doe's silver Mercedes. Dressed in military fatigues, Johnson punctuated his pronouncements by waving a cigar in one hand and a can of beer in the other. Though his troops had occasionally fought alongside ECOMOG against the N.P.F.L., Johnson was nearly as hostile to the peacekeeping force as he was to Taylor. "They told me to move my people out of Monrovia," he said. "I took that territory. It's mine." As for the differences between him and Taylor, said Johnson, "I want civilian rule...
...past few weeks Monrovia had turned relatively quiet, as ECOMOG troops set up checkpoints to keep the Johnson and Taylor factions apart. But death hovers over the city. Virtually no food shipments have arrived since rebel forces first entered Monrovia in July, and hunger is taking lives every day. The starving look as if they are sleeping, curled up on the sidewalks, but their eyes are open; they simply lack the strength to stand. Sam, 8, who approached me with his brother John, 11, pleaded, "Missy, we haven't eaten in three days." I took them to the flat where...