Liberia's warlord-turned-president, Charles Taylor, says he will step down on Monday. But don't count on it, reports Declan Walsh from Monrovia
The poker king may be playing his last hand. In battle-scarred Monrovia, an armoured convoy of Nigerian peacekeepers rumbles past Charles Taylor's luxurious mansion. Across the bridge, rebels keep their guns trained on him. And out on the Atlantic, American warships are looming.
Everyone, it seems, wants Liberia's warlord-turned-president out of power.
The pressure is paying off - after a string of broken promises, Taylor has finally agreed to step down next Monday.
But the game is not over yet. The wily leader has played the get-out-of-jail card many times before, one time literally so. In 1985 he leaped from the window of an American jail with the help of a hacksaw and a clump of bedsheets.
A second attempt at a Houdini stunt would surprise nobody. "He's a psychopathic killer so we don't know when he's going to resign or what he's going to do," says Jacques Klein, the UN special envoy to Liberia.
According to the script, power will pass to vice-president Moses Blah on Monday. Then Nigerian-led peacekeepers will fan across the city, seize the port and allow humanitarian access to the strangled city.
Almost certainly, it will not be so simple.
The Nigerian deployment ended two months of stop-start battle during which mortars rained on huddling refugees and stray bullets zipped through the streets. More than 1,000 people died, according to aid workers. The fighting may not be over yet.
Yesterday a senior official from the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) warned that if power passes to Blah, "we will definitely fight back". And there are ominous signs that Taylor's forces may be preparing for more bloodshed.
At 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, a Boeing 707 plane landed at Robertsfield International Airport, a 45 minute drive from the city. It carried two large containers; one empty, the other stuffed with rocket- propelled grenades, bazookas and thousands of rounds of ammunition. After a standoff, the Nigerians prevented Taylor's forces from collecting the consignment.
The Boeing returned to Libya where, according to reports, Taylor made a secret visit to his old ally President Muammar Gadafy about a week ago.
Taylor is one of Africa's last old-style dictators. He is smooth talking, charismatic and an occasional Baptist preacher. He has also destroyed his own country, and spread mayhem throughout the region. Elected as president, he has ruled as a warlord: smuggling weapons and diamonds, busting UN sanctions, hiring child soldiers and assassinating chosen enemies.
His 1997 democratic election seems a puzzle but made perfect sense to Liberians. During the 1989-1996 civil war, Taylor troops massacred tribal enemies and staked their heads at roadblocks. A year later, he was the strongest figure in a fragile nation. His unofficial campaign slogan was "you killed my ma, you killed my pa, I'll vote for you." Voters chose him overwhelmingly.
But now, after years of chaos and carnage, Liberians cannot wait to see him leave. Even some of his own forces admit he must go to bring peace.
"I want to go back to school, for a better tomorrow," says checkpoint soldier Emmanuel Kweah, waving a peace sign at LURD fighters on the other side.
Taylor's rise to power is rooted in historical tensions. For the first 133 years of its existence, freed American slaves ruled Liberia. They treated indigenous Africans like the slaves they had once been - excluding them from political power, education and even selling some into slavery abroad.
That domination ended with a 1980 army coup led by a semi-literate indigenous soldier, Samuel Doe, whose troops disembowelled President William Tolbert in his bed and strung 13 of his ministers from flagpoles.
Among his top officials was one Charles Taylor.
The son of an Americo-Liberian father and an African mother, the young Taylor had a reputation as a sharp operator. He had gone to the US and scraped together the money to pay for an economics degree from Bentley College, Massachusetts. But he was too sharp for some.
As the head of Doe's procurement agency, Taylor gained the nickname "Superglue" because, it was said, money tended to stick to him. In 1983, he was charged with embezzling $900,000 and fled back to Boston, where he was arrested for extradition a year later.
Fifteen months later came the famous jailbreak. Many Liberians still believe he was assisted by the CIA but the charge has never been proven.
Taylor made his way to Libya, where he enlisted in Gadafy's "revolutionary" camps, and later to Ivory Coast, from where he started the 1989 bush war. He ruthlessly manipulated tribe, poverty and regional rivalries to press for victory.
Allies in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Libya supplied guns and back-up bases. Thousands of children were press-ganged into a drugged-up force known as the Small Boys Unit.
However it was another rebel leader, Prince Johnson, who toppled Samuel Doe in 1990, famously cutting off his ears in a gruesome videotaped execution.
As president, Taylor refused to change his style. He helped spark the RUF rebellion in neighbouring Sierra Leone, where amputation was the signature atrocity. Liberia provided the RUF's supply line. Money, not philosophy, was his motivation. Out went rebel "blood diamonds", in came containers of guns.
After the UN-imposed sanctions in 2001, he turned to logging, stripping vast tracts of pristine forest to finance his warfare and his cronies. Monrovia became a hub for shady operators, such as Ukrainian gunrunners, Israeli gem dealers and Senegalese soldiers of fortune.
As Liberians slid further into dire poverty - illiteracy levels are still about 80 per cent - the ruling elite became fabulously rich. Swiss authorities say that Liberians hold assets worth $3.3 billion in their banks.
But criminals make enemies, and now Taylor's are striking back. The leaders of neighbouring Guinea and Ivory Coast are backing the rebels, while a UN-supported court in Sierra Leone has indicted him on charges of war crimes.
President George Bush has demanded his departure, as have a slew of African leaders not normally known for ganging up on fellow presidents, such as Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who has offered him asylum.
As ever, Taylor is stalling. Aides say he will not go until the war crimes charges are dropped. It could just be another bluff. That will be clear on Monday, when the poker king plays his last, desperate hand.