Disarmament finally ends nearly a month behind schedule

The United Nations has finally wound up its disarmament programme in Liberia, almost a month after the original deadline for former combatants to hand in their weapons, UN and government officials said on Wednesday. The disarmament programme was supposed to have finished at the end of October, but was extended at the last minute in two remote areas of northwestern and southeastern Liberia. General Daniel Opande, the commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Liberia, said about 5,000 fighters had been disarmed in Lofa county in the far northwest of the country, by the time the exercise ended there on Monday. Moses Jarbo, the executive director of the National Commission on Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration told IRIN that the process had also been completed in remote southeastern districts near the Ivorian border. "We can confirm that the exercise there has come an end," he said. "Even in Grand Kru where we had some problems getting to before the deadline." Jean Marie Guehenno, the head of UN peacekeeping operations in New York, said during a visit to Liberia earlier this week that over 100,000 former combatants in Liberia's 14-year civil war had reported for disarmament - more than twice as many as the UN originally anticipated. The completion of disarmament in Lofa County was vital to allow the return of tens of thousands of Liberia refugees, currently sheltering just across the border in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Lofa, which had been a stronghold of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement for the past five years, is a rich agricultural and diamond mining area which was regarded as Liberia's food basket prior to civil war erupting in 1989. Although the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, kicked off its repatriation programme for some 300,000 refugees at the beginning of October, officials have repeatedly said they will not send people back to areas that are unsafe and awash with weapons. To date, only seven out of 15 counties in Liberia have been declared safe for the return of the refugees who fled abroad and about 300,000 more people who were internally displaced within the country. The seven-month disarmament programme was due to have ended on 31 October, but as the deadline passed, the UN's special envoy to Liberia, Jacques Klein said the operation would continue in certain areas of the densely forested West African country. He said impassable dirt roads had prevented peacekeepers reaching many LURD units in isolated areas of Lofa county. But Opande said on Wednesday: "We put in a very extensive exercise to go to where the combatants were in Lofa, to disarm them... Two days ago we completed disarmament." The Kenyan general said some 800,000 rounds of ammunition had been handed in in Lofa county, as well as a large number of mortar bombs and rockets. Jarbo did not say how many fighters of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), the country's other rebel group, had been disarmed in the southeast. The area is close to the border with Cote d'Ivoire, and with another cycle of violence erupting there this month, aid workers worry that arms left over from Liberia's civil war may be taken across the border. A final detailed tally for the number of people disarmed and a full inventory of weapons handed in since the civil war ended in August 2003 was not immediately available from UN or government officials.