LURD drops threat to hold up disarmament

Liberia's main rebel movement, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), has dropped its threat to hold up the process of disarmament until its demand for more top jobs in government has been met. "We are willing to disarm at the start of the disarmament," LURD spokesman Charles Bennie told a news conference in Monrovia on Wednesday. "We have no intention to undermine the peace process, nor do we want the war to drag on," he added. On 27 November, all three armed factions in Liberia walked out of a meeting with UN representatives, saying they would not surrrender their guns to UN peacekeeping troops until their demands for the lion's share of 86 assistant minister posts and the number two slots in public corporations had been met. These demands were rejected out of hand by Jacques Klein, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative to Liberia. He said the question of government jobs could not be linked to disarmament and accused the faction leaders who made such demands of seeing "personal gain and self agrandizement." Since then all the warring factions have quietly backtracked. Former president Moses Blah made clear on Monday at a ceremony to formally launch the process of Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) that government forces would start surrendering their weapons on schedule next Sunday. Now LURD has agreed not to hold up the start of the exercise. And a UN spokesman said on Wednesday that a second rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), had also agreed to make its fighters hand in their guns on schedule. Patrick Coker, a spokesman for the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), said MODEL's top military commander, Boi Blehjue Boi, had given his word that MODEL fighters would start handing in their weapons on Sunday. "Yesterday, We had a JMC [Joint Monitoring Committee] meeting and General Boi made a commitment that MODEL is in full support of the DDR," he said. Bennie said LURD had no intention of undermining the Liberian peace agreement that it signed in Accra, Ghana on 18 August. This called for an immediate end to hostilities and the disarmament of all fighters. It also gave each of the warring factions five ministerial posts in the broad-based transitional government that took power on 14 October. The 21-member cabinet is due to lead Liberia to fresh elections in 2005. Asked if the LURD had dropped its demand for more jobs in the transitional government headed by businessman Gyude Bryant, Bennie said: "That is a political issue that we want the international community to step in and resolve." UNMIL aims to disarm about 40,000 Liberian fighters over the next five to six months following the end of a 14-year civil war that has devastated West African country and has left one in six of its three million inhabitants displaced and homeless. Three cantonment sites are to be opened initially at the Scheifflin army barracks near Monrovia, the LURD stronghold of Tubmanburg, 50 km northwest of the capital, and Buchanan, a port city controlled by MODEL 120 km to the southeast. Each camp will put up 1,000 combatants at a time through a three-week screening and demobilisation programme, after which they will receive a lump sum of money to help them adapt back to civilian life. "The cantonment site in Tubmanburg is in the process of being set up. As I speak to you, engineers are on their way there," Coker said. The UNMIL spokesman said some combatants were already being registered ahead of disarmament, at Compound Number One, a village half way between Monrovia and Buchanan and at Camp Scheifflin. He did not say how many had registered so far.