Disarmament to carry on in some corners despite end of programme

UN peacekeepers will continue disarming former fighters in some remote corners of northern and south-eastern Liberia despite the end of the official disarmament programme two days ago, UN special envoy Jacques Klein has said. Ex-combatants in south-eastern parts of country, near the border with Cote d'Ivoire, and northern areas close to the Sierra Leonean and Guinean borders, will still be able to hand in their weapons and qualify for a $300 resettlement grant. "We are aware there are still caseloads of combatants in some areas... that we were not able to reach because the roads were not motorable during the raining season," Klein said in a radio address on Monday. "We have made arrangements to fly mobile disarmament units into these areas in the coming days to conduct the disarmament and demobilization operations." Klein singled out three towns in the northern county of Lofa -- Foya, Kolahum and Vahum -- as places where large concentrations of former fighters could be found. Lofa is a former stronghold of the main rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). He gave no specific locations in the south-east, which was controlled by the second rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). But last month, a top UN commander said former rebels in the port town of Harper were proving slow in coming forward with their guns because they hoped to get more money by turning them over across the border in Cote d'Ivoire. While disarmament will carry on in pockets of Liberia, which has enjoyed 14 months of peace after 14 years of civil war, Klein was keen to stress that anybody found with a weapon outside the targeted areas would be arrested and prosecuted under Liberian law. It was a message repeated by the head of the country's transitional government Gyude Bryant. "This government will not take the issue of illegal possession of weapons lightly and there will be no preferential treatment. Everybody was given sufficient time to hand over the weapons," he told reporters on Tuesday. The UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) says 95,378 people -- including women and children -- had been disarmed by Sunday, when the official programme closed. Critics of the programme have long argued that only a fraction of those disarmed have actually handed in a weapon and they suspect ordinary civilians have been posing as ex-fighters to grab the cash handout. UNMIL said that by Sunday 27,000 rifles had been collected -- roughly one for every four people. It added that 29,000 rounds of heavy weapons ammunition and almost seven million rounds of small-arms ammunition had also been turned in. Riots that killed 18 people last week in Monrovia have raised fears in the capital. The city is under curfew from 4.00pm to 7.00am and schools remain closed following running battles involving youths wielding sticks, knives and broken bottles who also set fire to cars and buildings. "The cause, we believe, was a property dispute in the market area. Then other elements took advantage to press their own agendas," UNMIL spokesman James Boynton told IRIN on Tuesday. Some ordinary Liberians have called on the UN peacekeepers to conduct immediate house-to-house searches for weapons after some of the arrested rioters were found to have arms hidden in their homes. Witnesses told IRIN that UN peacekeepers had arrested some 80 people from the home of Philip Kamara, a former senior commander within LURD, and taken away rifles and petrol bombs. "There are factions of LURD that, we believe, don't want to see an end to DDR," UNMIL's Boynton said. Liberia's police chief, Chris Massaquoi, told IRIN that more than half of the 250 people arrested in connection with last week's flare-up were foreigners. "They are currently being processed jointly by the Liberian national police and the bureau of immigration," he said.