Monrovia, Sunday
AFRICAN peacekeepers today fanned out timidly to start taking back the streets of the Liberian capital after a week of tribal militia killings and looting.
As peace moves got under way the US wound up the first stage of its rescue mission in which army helicopters have ferried more than 1500 foreigners from Monrovia in over 50 sorties.
Today the evacuation switched to the sea, with a UN boat landing 300 people in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
A spokesman for the 8000-strong Nigerian-led peacekeeping force said units had taken control of the battered city's central commercial district.
Negotiations were also continuing to enable the force to cordon off the main army barracks at the heart of the latest fighting, where rebels are holed up along with 25,000 refugees and scores of hostages.
A hotel owner in the city's embassy and residential district said peacekeepers' road blocks had appeared and looting had substantially subsided.
``We are hoping that things will be under control,'' said the man, whose hotel is close to looted United Nations agencies whose workers have largely fled.
Fighting erupted on April 6 when Liberia's coalition government tried to arrest faction leader General Roosevelt Johnson on murder charges. There have been no estimates of how many people have died since then, but aid workers and fleeing residents have told of bodies in the streets.
More than 150,000 have been killed by the civil war in Liberia, founded by freed American slaves in 1847 as Africa's first independent republic.
About 300 people fleeing Monrovia arrived by boat in neighbouring Sierra Leone today as US helicopters brought out the last group by air.
Most of those on the Hollgen, chartered by the UN World Food Programme, were Lebanese, but there were also UN workers and sick and exhausted women who shuffled off the boat in Freetown harbour. - Reuter
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