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Liberian ex-fighters run riot
09/12/2003 19:28 - (SA)
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Ex-fighters have been offered $75 for their guns.
(Pewee Flomoku, AP) |
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Monrovia - A UN campaign to disarm fighters from Liberia's civil wars was at a standstill on Tuesday, as combatants ran riot in Monrovia, their guns blazing, to protest against the incentives they have been offered to lay down their arms.
Fighters from the back-to-back civil wars that killed more than 200 000 people since 1989 and sent hundreds of thousands fleeing, rampaged throughout the battle-scarred capital, causing panic.
Ignoring battle lines drawn in 1999 - which pitted rebels against the army and militias backing former president Charles Taylor - the fighters united against a common foe, the UN Mission to Liberia (Unmil) disarmament process.
Amid the sound of gunfire, young fighters chanted demands for more money in exchange for their arms.
Outside Unmil headquarters, UN special envoy Jacques Klein hastily convened a meeting with commanders of the armed factions laying siege to the city.
Klein emerged from the meeting with an offer of $75 payable to each fighter on handing over his weapon.
The money is part of a $300 stipend that was to have been distributed to fighters in two parts: the first half at the end of a three-week demobilisation programme and the second once the combatant was integrated back into his community.
"Now we are going to work on a new way of restarting the whole process," interim defence minister Daniel Chea said.
'The boys have not been informed'
"There was a problem of sensitisation. The boys have not been properly informed and now we are going to do that."
Unmil had hosted a series of workshops for commanders to explain the disarmament process to rank-and-file fighters, but the conditions had apparently not been passed down through the ranks, Unmil information officer Margaret Novicki said on Monday.
Interim justice minister Kabineh Janeh noted that Unmil has to do more than just build awareness of how the disarmament programme was supposed to work.
"Unmil needs to do its homework," said Janeh.
"You cannot start by disarming thousands of combatants if you don't even have, in the first place, a cantonment site for them."
Only a few fighters took up the new UN proposal, and accepted offers of transportation to the Schieffelin military barracks outside Monrovia, where the disarmament process had begun on Sunday.
Meanwhile, a looting spree begun at the weekend by rebels from the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model) in their eastern stronghold, Buchanan, showed no sign of abating on Tuesday.
Rumours reaching the capital from Buchanan suggested that Model is smuggling its weapons across the border into Ivory Coast.
The $50m UN-backed process to disarm and demobilise an estimated 40 000 combatants in Liberia opened to great fanfare, with some 1 400 former government fighters handing over their weapons to a battalion of Bangladeshi peacekeepers at the weekend.
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