VIOLENCE and looting blighted Easter Sunday in the Liberian capital yesterday after the council of state ordered police to arrest a deposed warlord on charges of murder.
Witnesses said fighters from the rival factions exchanged fire and set buildings ablaze as fighting spread to the city centre. There was no reliable casualty toll from the clashes, which began in the usually calm residential suburb of Sinkor on Saturday around the home of deposed faction leader Roosevelt Johnson and forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes.
Council member Charles Taylor, the man who launched Liberia's civil war on Christmas Eve 1989, rejected suggestions that militia rivalry was at the root of the fighting.
"This government, and not Mr Taylor of the NPFL, will do all it can to bring the situation under control and have General Johnson arrested," he said on his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) radio yesterday.
State radio repeatedly broadcast a statement from the West African peacekeeping force ECOMOG saying it would ensure that calm was restored in Africa's oldest independent republic, founded by freed American slaves in 1847.
The fighting, during which the two sides used machineguns, rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons, prevented Easter church services in many parts of the city during the morning.
Fighting began before dawn on Saturday after police laid siege to Mr Johnson's home and his supporters fought back. Police units surrounded the compound on the orders of the council of state, which has accused him of murder following a clash with militia rivals near his home.
Mr Johnson, a former teacher says he will not turn himself in to the police, whom he claims are infiltrated by the NPFL.
The war has killed over 150,000 people, wrecked the minerals and rubber based economy and made many people homeless.
Liberia's squabbling warlords and faction leaders agreed a peace deal in August, created the ruling council and promised elections within a year. That ceasefire has been repeatedly breached by skirmishing militiamen.
. Rwanda's leaders travelled to the southwestern town of Murambi yesterday to rebury victims of the genocide which occurred during the country's civil war, which started exactly two years ago.
The war was sparked by the shooting down over Kigali on April 6th, 1994 of the plane carrying Rwanda's first Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana. He died, along with Burundi's Hutu president Cyprien Ntaryamira.
The massacres began on the following day. Prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was one of the first to die, along with 10 Belgian UN soldiers guarding her.
The killing continued for three months, with extremists of the Hutu majority, then in power, slaughtering more than 500,000 men, women and children at a rate of around 5,000 a day.