Liberian businessman to lead transitional government
Liberia’s rebels and government picked a Monrovia businessman to lead the country’s post-war transition government, delegates told the Associated Press today after a day and night of deliberations.
The choice of Gyude Bryant as chairman was to be officially announced later today in Ghana’s capital, Accra.
Bryant, 54, pledged to work closely with the UN and other international agencies in the two-year transition government, meant to lead Liberia out of 14 years of bloodshed and into elections.
“I have lived there throughout all these problems, and I see myself as a healer,” Bryant told the AP early today in Accra, site of two and a half months of peace talks that played out during heavy fighting.
“I will try to meet the urgent, desperate social needs of our people.”
Liberia’s two insurgent movements and government picked Liberian Wesley Johnson as vice chairman.
Selection of a post-war government – and persistent fighting outside Liberia’s capital – comes two days after Liberia’s warring sides signed a power-sharing deal following warlord-president Charles Taylor’s August 11 resignation and flight into exile.
As part of the peace accord, combatants agreed not to vie for the interim government’s top posts themselves. They picked them instead from a list of nominees submitted by political parties and civic groups.
Combatants rejected the best-known of the three candidates for chairwoman: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who lost 1997 elections to Taylor and has lived in exile since.
The newly chosen interim government is to take power from Taylor’s designated successor, former Vice President Moses Blah, in October.
The new government itself is to yield to an elected government in 2005.
Taylor, a Libyan-trained guerrilla fighter, plunged once-prosperous Liberia into bloodletting in 1989 at the head of a small insurgency.
The seven-year civil war that followed killed at least 150,000 people.
Taylor won the first post-war elections, in a campaign boosted by his charisma, his wealth from illegal trafficking, and fears that he would revive the war if he lost.
Taylor’s enemies began their own uprising in 1999. In June, they began a siege of the capital that forced Taylor out 10 weeks later, with West African leaders and the US urging him to go.
