By David Clarke
MONROVIA (Reuters) - Aid workers struggled on Tuesday to help thousands of people left stranded, wounded or sick by fighting in Liberia's capital as the United States resisted any firm commitment to lead a peacekeeping force.
Pressure has been mounting on the United States, already stretched by deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, to take a lead role in ending nearly 14 years of conflict in a West African nation founded by freed American slaves more than 150 years ago.
U.N. officials, West African leaders, France, Britain and Liberians all want the United States to lead a force, but Washington so far appears reluctant. U.S. officials well remember the humiliating withdrawal from a humanitarian mission to Somalia in 1993.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has said the United States was looking at a variety of options and that President George W. Bush would be informed and a decision made.
The question of America's role in Liberia will hang over Bush's five-day African trip next week. Bush is not going to Liberia but has already urged President Charles Taylor, a former warlord now indicted for war crimes, to quit.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said a multinational force is needed to prevent "a major humanitarian tragedy."
In Monrovia's diplomatic quarter, workers from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) set up long white tents to treat the thousands of people who fled to the city centre during two rebel assaults this month, which cost around 700 lives.
Workers set foundations on blocks in the mud for tents, where people suffering from cholera, diarrhoea and bullet wounds will be treated.
"For about a week no one was able to do anything," said Dominique Liengme, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Liberia.
"We did quite a lot of assessment yesterday. The schools in town are packed. I don't think you can have a situation like that without an epidemic," she told Reuters.
MISSION DELAYED
Already cholera has taken hold of exhausted people who have spent much of the last four month in the open, often under torrential rain, with little food or drinking water. In the past four weeks, around 620 people have been treated for the disease.
In Geneva, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Tuesday it could begin shipping home some 15,000 Sierra Leonean refugees trapped in Liberia within days, provided the ceasefire holds.
Many residents in Monrovia fear a resurgence of the fighting between rebels and troops loyal to Taylor despite a ceasefire declared by insurgents last Friday.
The arrival of a team of monitors aiming to separate Liberia's foes and map an ill-defined front line was delayed until Wednesday, regional officials said.
Liberia's Defence Minister Daniel Chea said the arrival of the monitors, known as the Joint Verification Team, would signal the start of all other ceasefire activities.
"Once the JVT gets on the ground, they will do their work, verify those areas where various groups are," he said. "We believe this is the way forward." The United States plans to provide one military expert to the team.
Liberia's conflict has poisoned West Africa by creating a generation of ruthless young fighters, who have spread chaos across nearby borders in their brutal quest for loot.
Rebels fighting to oust Taylor now hold 60 percent of the country and want Taylor, who has been indicted for war crimes in neighbouring Sierra Leone by an international court, to quit.
Taylor has offered to go at the end of his elected mandate in January but he wants the indictment lifted.
The American-educated leader emerged as the dominant faction leader in a war that left 200,000 dead in the 1990s and went on to win 1997 polls.