Word: nigerias
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...casualties are civilian. Most combatants avoid fighting, preferring to spray bullets at the other side and then run. The rebels' only stated goal is the ouster of President Charles Taylor, a recently indicted war criminal who insists he is willing to step down and go into exile in Nigeria but keeps creating excuses to postpone his departure. In any case, the opposition is so fragmented and unpopular that there's no obvious candidate to replace him. So it is that even as hordes of angry Liberians dumped dead bodies at the gates of the U.S. embassy in Monrovia...
...troops in Ivory Coast, and West African soldiers in Congo as part of a United Nations peacekeeping force, ECOMOG is already stretched thin. "We just can't meet all these crises," says spokesman Sunny Ugoh. "We still need help to help ourselves." The biggest problems are money and logistics. Nigeria, which has supplied the bulk of the troops for past ECOMOG missions, says it has spent billions of dollars on peacekeeping over the past 13 years. South Africa, which is not a member but is often asked to help out financially, has its own commitments in central Africa and last...
...drinking water supplies dwindle and cholera becomes a real threat. The most immediate cause cited by West African leaders for the delay in getting an ECOWAS force onto the ground may be financial. The Nigerians claim their peacekeeping efforts in neighboring Sierra Leone over the past decade have cost Nigeria $12 billion, and they want assurances that this time the international community will pick up the tab - a call echoed in a U.S.-sponsored resolution currently before the UN Security Council. Besides financial aid, the West African force will also need logistical aid to airlift its troops...
...Nigeria's previous interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone have been somewhat messy: Hundreds of Nigerian troops were killed, making the deployments unpopular domestically. And in retaking the capital of Sierra Leone from rebel fighters, Nigerian forces displayed a brutality akin to that of some of the region's warlords, and UN officials later accused some Nigerian officers of corruption. More immediately, veterans of previous peacekeeping operations have warned that the scale of the Nigerian force envisaged for Liberia is insufficient to stabilize Monrovia...
...limits being set by Washington on what its troops may do has not been well-received by the West Africans. Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo told the BBC, "If your house is on fire and somebody says: 'Here I am. I have my fire engine. Now when you put your fire out on your house, I will come in.' I wonder what sort of help that is, with all due respect." And the fact that the U.S. has a fire engine and a corps of firefighters whose capabilities dwarf those of everyone else in the neighborhood makes it difficult...