Thirty years ago, the Ducor Hotel in Monrovia was one of the most exclusive places to stay in Liberia. Overlooking the blue-green waters of the North Atlantic, its tiled balconies, tennis courts and signature French restaurant made it popular with honeymooning couples from Ghana and Ivory Coast. It was paradise - a sanctuary.

Today, after 13 years of civil war in Liberia, the hotel is a shell. Liberia's long conflict, led by Charles Taylor, now awaiting trial for war crimes in The Hague, left 250,000 people dead, destroyed the country's infrastructure and drove half the population from their homes.

The Ducor Hotel closed its doors to guests after war broke out in December 1989. Most of the staff fled long before the rebels and looters arrived, ripping up carpets, destroying furniture and stealing. It stood empty for years.

When peace finally came to Monrovia in 2003, thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) took refuge in vacant buildings like this one. Four years on, with unemployment at around 80 percent, most of them have not yet raised enough funds to leave.

Inside the Ducor Hotel, 2,500 squatters are crammed into 300 rooms. At night, sleeping bodies spill into the hotel's dark corridors, skeletal stairways and crumbling lift shafts.

The pool has been dry for years. Children play at the bottom, sliding around on empty milk containers and fashioning makeshift teddy bears from old t-shirts and berries. In the lobby, a boy swings on a loose electric cable. Elsewhere in the world, he would be risking electrocution. There is no danger of that here - Liberia hasn't had a functioning electricity network since the nineties.

In the stairwells, the smell of misery is intense. Not because of the conditions here - those have become as normal as the broken floorboards, banisters and bones - but because the Ministry of Justice has just asked all 2,500 people sheltering here to leave.

The Ducor is just one of hundreds of buildings in Monrovia earmarked for destruction and redevelopment. You see them everywhere - houses, schools, government buildings, shops - slashed with fat yellow crosses, no apology.

In the lobby I meet Moses Youlo. He first walked through the doors of this hotel in 1976 to begin his first shift as a security guard. He never left, sheltering here throughout Liberia's long years of uncertainty. He explains that the hotel has been bought by Libyan developers, who plan to restore it to its former glory. "It's a good thing for Liberia" he says. Just not for him.

"I understand why we have to leave", Ben Johnson tells me, upstairs on the first floor. "Investment is a good thing for Liberia. But we have been asked to leave in the middle of the school term. We'll have to rent a place to stay in town. The children go to school around the corner. There's no way we'll be able to afford transport here every day, and who knows when my wife and I will be able to afford to send them to a new school?"

For Ben, the move will cost him all he has. He plans to sell a mattress in order to afford to rent a small flat in Monrovia's Westpoint slum for a month. Shelling out for school fees and transport will be out of the question. Besides, many of the schools in Westpoint are already full.

When, last month, Liberian National Investment Commissioner Richard Tolbert - supported by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf - announced that the Libyan investors were ready to begin renovation work at the Ducor, he gave the squatters a month to leave. Everyone I speak to here talks highly of the president and her motives. They know that Liberia is in desperate need of investment. But no provision has been made for alternative accommodation. "Why should there be?" says Moses. "Nobody asked us to move in here in the first place."

As the two of us climb a skeletal staircase, I ask Moses how he thinks Liberia should address the problem. He shakes his head. He doesn't know. Nobody here knows. The government is eager to secure much-needed funds to rebuild the country. Saying no to investment opportunities would be foolish. But in saying yes, thousands are being forced onto the streets, where drug abuse and rape are common.

Moses fingers a stained holiday brochure. "This is what the place used to look like" he says, eager to impress, talking up the swim-up bar, Lebanese cocktail waitresses and Warhol-inspired lounge. "I can't wait to see it up and running again. But I can't believe we must leave before the academic year is out. Still, you cannot please all the people all the time..." His voice trails off as he rushes to greet a group of boys returning from school.

I survey the scene from the top of the stairs and wonder if Liberia is yet stable enough to support the kind of investment that ousts people from their homes and disrupts the schooling of yet another generation. An electric cable falls from the ceiling, closely followed by several loose tiles. So much here is fragile.

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