GOREE ISLAND (Senegal), July 8: US President George W. Bush began an African trip on Tuesday by pledging to help restore peace to war-ruined Liberia and branding slavery one of history’s greatest crimes.

Bush told West African leaders he would participate in efforts to enforce a fragile ceasefire in Liberia’s 14 years of civil war, but White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said it would be “some time” before Washington decided whether to send troops.

“The United Nations is going to be involved. The United States will work with ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States),” Bush told reporters after the meeting in Senegal’s capital Dakar.

Bush, facing a presidential election next year in which the African-American vote could be crucial, went to a Senegalese shore from which Africans were once dispatched to the Americas in chains to call slavery one of history’s greatest crimes.

At a former slave trading station on Goree Island, off Dakar, Bush said in a speech: “At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold.”

Since African-Americans voted heavily against him in the 2000 US presidential election, Bush has sought to woo black voters to the Republican Party.

Bush’s speech but did not win many friends on Goree.

“We are very angry. We didn’t even see him,” said necklace seller Fatou N’diaye, who like other residents said they were taken to a soccer ground on the other side of the island at 6 a.m and told to wait there until Bush departed around midday.—Reuters