Ghana to negotiate with Sierra Leone coup leaders

FREETOWN, June 5 A Ghanaian delegation plans talks with Sierra Leonean coup leaders on Thursday to try to avert a threatened showdown with Nigerian-led West African forces massing in Freetown.

Nigeria sent in additional troops on Wednesday from a joint West African force it is heading in neighbouring Liberia as more foreigners were evacuated and Freetown residents streamed out of the city to the interior.

Negotiations led by British and Nigerian diplomats to persuade leaders of the May 25 coup to back down collapsed on Sunday night.

Nigerian gunboats shelled the capital on Monday in a show of force which turned into a rout when rebels attacked Nigerian troops guarding foreigners at a hotel.

A truce was negotiated by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the city has been quiet since then.

Rebels of the Revolutionary United Front have poured out of the bush to join the coup soldiers. They firmly oppose a settlement and any deal would have to include a way of getting them out of the capital, where they are terrorising civilians.

Ghana's deputy foreign minister, Victor Gbeho, and Brigadier Seth Obeng, chief of staff at army headquarters, held talks in Monrovia on Wednesday with commanders of the Nigeria-led ECOMOG force, which has troops in Sierra Leone.

ECOMOG is the Monitoring Group of the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

After a big U.S. evacuation on Tuesday, two French navy frigates evacuated 734 foreign nationals on Wednesday, many of them from French-speaking West African countries.

Britain chartered a Boeing 747 to bring evacuees from Guinea to London on Thursday.

Residents have virtually abandoned the seafront Aberdeen district, which was hit by shells on Monday, fleeing either into the city centre or to the interior.

The military say 80 people were killed on Monday, other sources put the number at less than 50. Liberian refugees fled the Jui camp, which lies between the Nigerian base and positions of Sierra Leonean troops and rebels of the Revolutionary United Front.

Refugee spokesman Mac Varney Rogers said the camp's 5,000 population had moved to a disused airfield nearby where they were no longer in the line of fire but were sleeping in the open air. ``When it rains, we get soaked,'' he said.

A spokesman for the coup leaders said they had freed 300 Nigerian soldiers whom they captured on Monday to hold as human shields against air raids.

ECOMOG, which did not comment on the reports until the Nigerians' release was announced, said none of its men were held hostage.

U.N. sources said some Nigerians had been detained when they went to rescue troops from a hotel at the centre of the fighting on Monday, but the number of 300 seemed rather high.

``All of our soldiers are accounted for in the two locations we occupied in Freetown,'' said ECOMOG Field Commander General Victor Malu.

Sierra Leone, a former British colony racked by civil war since 1991, has suffered three coups in five years. It is one of the world's poorest countries despite a wealth of minerals.

The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Harare called for the restoration of ousted civilian President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who is in neighbouring Guinea.

``We unanimously and unreservedly condemned the coup d'etat in Sierra Leone as an enormous setback for democracy in Africa,'' Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, the new OAU chairman, told the closing session. REUTER@