Richard Dowden: Charles Taylor has resigned, but will he be back?

The warlords still have their millions and their mobiles; it would be disastrous to hold an election immediately

When Charles Taylor stepped down as President of Liberia yesterday, west Africans breathed a sigh of relief. The preacherman, showman, warlord, slave owner and cannibal was gone at last. His removal is not a bad first step to pull Liberia and the region out of the horrors of the last decade; but he was a symptom, not a cause.

Most immediately Taylor's departure might create a vacuum that the presence of 770 Nigerian troops and a few South Africans cannot fill. The people of Monrovia are frightened, hungry and angry; they may begin to riot and loot. More dangerous, Taylor's own fighters, having nothing left to lose, may also start to snatch what they can while they still have guns and bullets.

The rebels, known as Liberians for Reconciliation and Democracy, may also take advantage of demoralised Taylor fighters and a weak Nigerian peacekeeping force to try to grab the rest of Monrovia. They want power for themselves; they might not settle for a soft interim regime and have already said they will not accept the succession of Taylor's Vice-President, Moses Blah.

The quiet, retiring Mr Blah is an unknown quantity but has been a long-standing Taylor lieutenant. In the 1970s, he went for ideological and military training in Libya. Not that this makes him a revolutionary. Almost all those west Africans who went through Colonel Gadaffi's revolutionary school in the 1970s used the radical rhetoric and the military tactics of revolution to grab political power and then enrich themselves with diamonds, timber, extortion or whatever they could capture for themselves.

Taylor may not have been trained in Libya, but he received Gadaffi's backing when he started a bush war in 1979. Accumulating huge resources as he went, he had no difficulty in turning his bullets into ballots when, eight bloody years later, he stood for election and won 75 per cent of the vote. Some votes were bought, some fiddled, but most Liberians, traumatised by civil war, probably voted for Taylor because they reckoned that if he were not made President he would continue to destroy their lives.

Taylor's own contribution to the new revolutionary order has been to arm the rebels in Sierra Leone in exchange for diamonds and to force people to work as slaves on the vast plantations and forests he seized. Several former colleagues also testify that he took part in ritual cannibalism, a mark of some of the secret societies that are rife in this part of West Africa.

Although he ducked and weaved, the presence of three African leaders finally forced Taylor into exile in Nigeria, where a mansion in the coastal town of Calabar has been prepared for him. But will the Nigerians double-cross him and hand him over to the international court in Sierra Leone, which has indicted him on several charges connected with the civil war? The Americans who set up the court as a swift, cheap alternative to the disastrous Rwandan tribunal, cannot allow it to fail. President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria will come under immense pressure to hand him over and, if given some debt relief, may do so.

The court needs Taylor behind bars because its chief quarry, Foday Sankoh, the psychopathic leader of the Sierra Leonean rebels, has died. His chief lieutenant is also reported dead, probably murdered by Taylor, leaving the court with eight insignificant underlings and Hinga Norman, the former Sierra Leonean Defence Minister, who is regarded by some as a national hero. Unlike President Kabbah, Mr Norman did not run away when the rebels approached Freetown but organised a defence and fought back. He is charged because his troops committed barbarities similar to those used by the rebels. If Norman is sent to prison while Taylor sits in a palace in Calabar, the court will be seen as a farce.

But even with Taylor out of the way, Liberia's agony may be far from over. In this part of west Africa there is no shortage of Taylors and hundreds of thousands of young men, barely literate, unskilled and with no prospects of a living or hope for a future. They are easy prey for rich, charismatic preachers like Taylor. Given drugs, a gun and fetishes, they are inducted into murder and worse by perverted forms of old religious rituals. Gangs of them have ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone and parts of Ivory Coast and Guinea. Disarming them and bringing them back into society is not easy, but, extraordinarily, people do accept them.

It will take time, however. Taylor and the other warlords still have their millions and their mobiles, and it would be disastrous to hold an election until they are marginalised. In 1995-96 all the armed factions kept their weapons and their assets. The international negotiators did not have the political will or muscle to call their bluff. That led to a recognition by outsiders and Liberians that the powerful must be confirmed in power. Taylor was allowed to win the 1997 election and become President.

This time the interveners have to be more powerful than the warlords. They must disarm them, trace their looted riches and turn them over to the state. Only when Liberians feel able to vote without looking over their shoulders at the gunmen should there be another election in Liberia.

Richarddowden@blueyonder.co.uk

The writer is the director of the Royal African Society