MOST eyes this week have been focussed on - or, perhaps more accurately, averted from - the pictures of Uday and Qusay Hussein, the men responsible for many of the 300,000 bodies in mass graves in Iraq.

And so most eyes missed what has happened in Liberia in west Africa where, earlier this week, about 600, possibly 700, civilians died. Twenty-six of their corpses were dumped outside the US embassy by people desperate for the Americans to intervene.

Liberia was formed by the Americans in 1816 as a place where freed slaves could be repatriated. For slaves living to the south of the Mason-Dixon line (drawn, of course, by the man from Cockfield), Liberia was a place of liberation. It was the promised land.

These Afro-Americans didn't treat the native Africans kindly, using them as slaves in the Liberian plantations. All of this resentment simmered for more than a century, culminating in an army coup against the Communist President William Tolbert in 1980. President Samuel Doe, backed by the US, took over, suspended the constitution created in 1822 and the country slid inexorably into civil war.

In 1990, Doe was killed, and his ears were sliced off and eaten by his killers. A further 150,000 Liberians died as Charles Ghankay Taylor emerged victorious - assisted by his "Small Boy Units" which comprised baby soldiers aged no more than eight.

In 1995, Taylor won 75.3 per cent of the vote in an 'election', possibly because only the very brave dared vote against him for fear that their heads would be severed and placed around his strongholds in Bong county.

Taylor has profited from Liberia's valuable natural resources of timber, diamonds and gold. His personal fortune is about £300m and just yesterday £1m was frozen in newly-discovered Swiss bank accounts.

We British are practically at war with him. In 2000, Tony Blair sent troops to neighbouring Sierra Leone which was threatened by the Revolutionary United Front. The Front uses Taylor's weapons to cut off children's limbs and steal diamonds which he then exports.

In May, the UN declared Liberia's diamond trade illegal but allowed the timber trade to continue. This was at France's insistence because France imports a third of Liberia's "logs of war". These logs rape the west African rainforests and finance Taylor's war effort. The boats that arrive in Port Buchanan to collect the timber bring with them guns which are ferried up the African coast and fired at British soldiers.

There is a contingent of 1,500 west African "peace-keeping" troops, mainly Nigerians, on stand-by to move into Liberia and its capital, Monrovia, where 200,000 homeless people are living in football stadiums.

The Liberian people are not keen, though, because the last time the Nigerians came "peace-keeping" in the early 1990s, all they did was rape and loot. The Liberians, therefore, want the Americans to come to their aid, but the Americans' last African engagement in Somalia ended in embarrassment.

Taylor has agreed to leave Liberia with his fortune when the peace-keepers arrive; the peace-keepers won't arrive until there are guarantees of some peace to keep; the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy fight bloodily to drive Taylor out so that the peace-keepers can get in.

It is as big a mess as Uday's face, but nowadays 600 civilian deaths are only worth small pieces inside newspapers.