Stabilization Force, Plus More Aid, Needed Now in Liberia

Baltimore, July 2, 2003 — As yet another truce settles on Monrovia, Liberia, Lutheran leaders there are calling urgently for peacekeepers and humanitarian relief from the outside world.

"We intend to add our voices with others in the calling upon the U.S. Government and the international community to deploy in Liberia without further delay a stabilization force," said the Rev. Sumoward Harris, bishop of the Lutheran Church in Liberia in an open letter written last weekend. "Both government and rebel forces have stopped shooting at each other, but in the absence of an international force any party can break the truce," he wrote.

The current truce has opened a window for aid work to resume again, reported Charles Pitchford, the Lutheran World Federation representative in Liberia. After weathering last week's combat, he said his staff is providing the food and relief items they have available among about 100,000 of the capitol's displaced people.

Help is not far away. A million-dollar shipment of basic necessities from Lutheran World Relief and 52 tons of emergency rations from Norwegian Church Aid are expected to reach the LWF in Monrovia this week. Part of the LWR shipment is for a hospital in the interior of the beleaguered West African nation.

"What brought tears to my eyes was the massive movement of tens of thousands of people trekking back to their original places," wrote Harris of the approximately 250,000 people who have sought refuge in the city and then had to flee bouts of urban civil war. Some walked with nothing, he said, and others pushed their old people along in wheelbarrows.

"The humanitarian crisis is beyond our scope," Harris said. He had shared a few bags of rice with 200 people sheltering in a church school, he said, "But it was just a drop in the ocean."