The appalling demographic statistics of Liberia's civil war have been dramatised by the refugee crisis of recent days. Some 4,000 passengers on the rusting vessel Bulk Challenge were refused permission to land in neighbouring states until Ghana's change of mind yesterday. Since 1989 an estimated 750,000 people, about one third of the total population, have fled the civil war, going to Guinea and the Ivory Coast. Another 150,000 have been killed.
It has been aptly described as a forgotten war, joining others in West Africa, notably in neighbouring Sierra Leone. International attention has focused on it only sporadically, when the fighting became particularly heavy and vicious, or when one of the dozen or so peace deals have been agreed over the last seven years. The fighting originated when a former civil servant, Charles Taylor, launched a rebellion from the Ivory Coast against the government led by President Samuel Doe, who was subsequently tortured to death. Liberia's ethnic and tribal conflicts are traceable back to the settlement of the country by freed American slaves in the last century, who developed the country based on iron ore and rubber plantations and whose descendants were resented by the original inhabitants.
The endemic factionalism of the recent conflict has been compounded by a startling involvement of teenagers, a proliferation of automatic weapons and a horrifyingly gratuitous pattern of violence. All this has made it extremely difficult for the international agencies and United Nations personnel who have struggled to provide relief services and for those who have tried to broker peace agreements or contribute to peacekeeping forces.
The latest Ghanaian decision to allow refugees in was taken after Unicef assured its government that they could handle relief facilities for thousands of people. The apparently heartless refusal to allow them entry in recent days arose from a fear of setting precedents other states in the region take a similar approach. There are clear limits on their capacity to absorb refugees without a much greater commitment of resources by the international community. Unfortunately, neither in the humanitarian nor the political sphere is this likely to be forthcoming.
There are signs of impatience and peacemaking fatigue among regional African organisations whose persistent efforts to sponsor peace agreements have collapsed time after time. The latest agreement, brokered by the Organisation of African Unity and the Economic Community of West African States last autumn, lies in ruins. It provided for power sharing between Mr Taylor and Mr Roosevelt Johnson, but collapsed when an attempt was made to arrest the latter on murder charges last month, leading to the present round of fighting.
Fatalistic dismissal of the possibility of helping Liberians overcome their conflict is all too tempting and easy a response. The country is not without friends and influence, elsewhere in Africa, in the UN and the United States. The disintegration of political regimes in West Africa has been one of the most graphic examples of political disorder it can be confronted or allowed to fester, with further appalling loss of life. Prudence as well as common humanity should stimulate another attempt by the international community to bring it to an end, as has recently been successfully accomplished in Sierra Leone.