IRIN interview with Ambassador Oluyemi Adeniji

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan named Ambassador Oluyemi Adeniji, a Nigerian diplomat, as his special representative for Sierra Leone in November 1999, at a time when the peacemaking and peacekeeping process in the war-ravaged West African country was at a critical stage. The special representative is head of the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). In an interview with IRIN in his office at Mammy Yoko, Freetown, on 3 July, Adeniji said the heavy UN investment in the country had been worthwhile and had changed people's attitudes towards peacekeeping. He also explained the challenges facing post-conflict Sierra Leone, including the security threat posed by the Liberian conflict and the need for the international community to stay engaged in Sierra Leone: QUESTION: Ambassador Oluyemi Adeniji, the conflict in Sierra Leone officially ended six months ago and the country is emerging from a 10-year period of war. What do you see as the immediate major challenges facing post-conflict Sierra Leone? ANSWER: Well, the challenges essentially are to consolidate the peace through a process, a conscious effort, of national reconciliation and two, national reconciliation with no segment of the society being marginalised - even if a person belongs to a party which did not support the majority party in the elections. Then the government, with the very overwhelming majority that the ruling party has, has to deliver and deliver very quickly on electoral promises which perhaps attracted a lot of people to vote for it. If that does not happen, disillusionment will set in again. In that context, of course, there is rehabilitation of the infrastructure, assistance to refugees who have been either in Liberia or Guinea, and assistance for internally displaced people who had been relocated from their areas to Freetown and who have now been taken back home - to make sure that basic requirements are available for them in homes they will go back to. This is a big challenge because you have to make sure that health services and education are provided, law and order are assured. All these go side by side with long-term efforts at the reconstruction of the country. It is only in the reconstruction of the country that employment can be generated, which would engage a lot of the young people who at this time do not have jobs. Finally, and this is not the least of the problems, there is the reintegration of the ex-combatants because one of the promises that were made to induce them to disarm and demobilise was that they would be given the skills for alternative means of earning a livelihood. If that does not happen, then the country will be in trouble again. Q: If we can take specific examples you mentioned - the question of IDPs and returnees, and of reintegration of ex-combatants. To what extent do you think Sierra Leone is taking definite steps to resolve these issues? A: The government has established an organisation for the resettlement of the refugees and internally displaced people. Its focus is to assist people returning by providing basic infrastructure in their communities. That is being done along with assistance from UNAMSIL and UNDP. The thing is that this has to be stepped up because the number is quite large. As far as ex-combatants are concerned, there is a government institution, NCDDR, which is supposed to be dealing with that. We have been working very closely with the NCDDR, particularly at the stages of disarmament and demobilisation. For reintegration, which we consider as an indispensable side leg of this process if it is to be a lasting success, the program has been slow for a number of reasons. One has been a question of funding, but the other is the question of the capacity of the institution to cope with the numbers involved. Let us face it, we were given an estimate of a maximum of 25,000 combatants to be disarmed, demobilised and reintegrated. But by the time we finished the program the figure had doubled to about 50,000. There is still a backlog who haven't even been paid their initial transitional allowance to last them for the period before they go into reintegration programs. These problems are there and we have to deal with them every day. Two days ago, yesterday also, there were demonstrations by ex-combatants who are getting impatient and for good reason. Many of them find it difficult even to feed themselves. Q: You mention UNDP and UNAMSIL supporting the reintegration process. True, the UN has played a critical role in getting the whole process off the ground. Do you think Sierra Leone as a country is prepared at this point for a UN drawback. Can the country cope if the UN said in the next few months, here is your baby, please take care of it? A: Certainly not. If only from the point of view of security. It cannot because the police are still very, very under strength. Even the army has not come to a desirable strength and is just being trained. They do not in our view have the capacity to cope with the kind of pressure that we are already seeing from Liberia and which will increase if the situation in Liberia is not addressed quickly. We have been doing a lot to discourage a major influx of armed people from Liberia to this country. Apart from refugees, there have also been cases of armed Liberians either from the LURD [rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy] and from the government forces who have been crossing over with their guns which have to be taken away from them because they say they are tired of fighting, want to deposit their arms and don't want to go back. The government of Sierra Leone is in fact now thinking of establishing a camp where they will be kept for the time being. Q: I will ask you about Liberia again. But could you give a time frame during which the government of Sierra Leone needs to continue receiving extensive support from the international community? A: Support is on two sides - that given by the UN in the context of UNAMSIL and by the specialised agencies of the UN, and that of the bilateral partners of Sierra Leone. The UN support is the one to which you can give a time frame. The others will have to continue anyhow. For the UN support, that depends on our assessment in the next few months. What I can assure you is that the UN itself has now certainly come to the conclusion that the holding of free, fair elections - however successful the elections may be, cannot be taken as a yardstick to immediately pull off the rug on which the security of the country has depended for some time and expect that everything will be fine. Q: When might the UN disband the UNAMSIL operation? A: We are not talking of withdrawing tomorrow or the day after or the month after or in two months' time. We want to give ourselves time to assess the post-election situation, to examine the situation in Liberia before we can make appropriate recommendations to the Security Council. At the end of the day, it is the Security Council in its wisdom that will determine. Q: Your mandate is limited to Sierra Leone. But you are also quite concerned about Liberia? What are you doing within the region about the Liberia question? A: I have been working with ECOWAS [Economic Community of West African States] and I am constantly in touch with them. I have gone to meet the chairman, President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal. I met the former chairman before he handed over power, President Alpha Konare of Mali. I have also met President [Olusegun] Obasanjo of Nigeria and the Ghanaian Foreign Minister in Accra in the absence of President [John] Kuffuor- all to emphasize to them the urgency of ECOWAS doing something about the Liberian conflict. I feel I am preaching to the converted because they themselves are fully aware that if the Liberian situation is not addressed it is going to have a terrible effect on the fragile situation in Sierra Leone. They have been hearing from humanitarian agencies of the problems being posed by just the influx of refugees. The influx, which is putting pressure on Sierra Leoneans in Liberia to come home more quickly than some of them had anticipated, is putting pressure on the neighbouring villages. These villagers themselves are trying to find their feet and then you suddenly find this influx, with UNHCR trying to help enable them to pass through. The long and short of it is - my people say ‘you hit me with a cutlass and I want to pretend that I am a strong man so I say: Oh, that is nothing. I don't feel it’. It is not as if you have not been hit by anything big but certainly you will find traces of it even if it does not produce blood. This is the situation with this kind of influx. Some American groups have already sounded that alarm in the US. Q: The authorities in Liberia argue that one of the reason things in the country have deteriorated is because of UN sanctions. President Charles Taylor has recently not been keen on the ECOWAS initiative either, preferring the Moroccan one instead. Do you see yourself making an impact on the Liberian situation? A: No, I am not trying to make a direct impact on the Liberian situation. The Liberian situation is a reality - ECOWAS or no ECOWAS, UN or no UN, OAU or no OAU, Rabat or No Rabat, which the Liberian government has to confront on a daily basis. The point is that there is a conflict in Liberia which the government cannot cope with and so whatever they might think is the best way of approaching it, that is left to them to determine. But that is not the same thing as saying that others who see that the repercussions of this problem will go beyond Liberia should not immediately act to make sure that such repercussions do not create chaos in other countries. My people say ‘if your neighbour’s house is on fire - even if he assures you that there is nothing to worry about, you better worry because you will be in no position to determine the reaction of the fire. It only takes a little wind to get it to your own house’. Q: So you are saying that Liberia's neighbours and organisations like ECOWAS and the UN should continue active engagement on the Liberia question? A: The UN is constantly trying to engage in Liberia. There is hardly any time when the Security Council meets and Liberia comes up that they don't come up with a statement encouraging the Liberians to resolve their problems and encouraging ECOWAS to be active in helping the Liberians to resolve their problems. The last time an ECOWAS group went there, what President Charles Taylor said was - the meeting of the Mano River Union was going to take place on 28 June; he said on that occasion that instead of the new initiative, let us see where this Rabat process is going because what is the Rabat process? Just a meeting between the three heads of state. Because of President Taylor's conviction that the LURD is being encouraged, if not actively aided, within the region, that a further meeting in Rabat may be able to make each one of them accept not to aid dissidents from each other’s country. But at the end of the day, there will still be a need to have a neutral group to ensure that each of them keeps his side of the bargain. And who can provide that besides ECOWAS and the UN? Q: The history of UN peacekeeping and peacekeeping has been a mixed one of success and frustrations. Why do you think UNAMSIL has been successful in bringing relative peace to Sierra Leone? A: There are a number of factors. One is the determination of the UN to see it through - in other words, not to be discouraged by the first sign of a reverse. This is a new factor because in 2000, one of the parties to the agreement signed by the Sierra Leoneans in Lome was not serious about implementing it. When that happened, in the past the UN would have said ‘let us just pack up and go because they are not yet ready’. The UN decided at that time that they were going to stick it out. From then on, engagement with ECOWAS became very constant. We set up an informal mechanism so that ECOWAS could exert its own pressure within the region on the political aspects of resolving the issues. Thus, with the support of ECOWAS, we could concentrate the peacemaking and peacekeeping internally here. Then, at the crucial time when it looked like the mission was in some difficulty because of the small number of troops which we had, a bilateral partner of Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, was willing to temporarily supplement the UN forces, not under UN auspices, but by invoking a bilateral agreement they had with Sierra Leone. The two battalions that they brought at the time UNAMSIL was in dire need of troops did help. But beyond that has been the pressure constantly put on Charles Taylor both by ECOWAS and the UN through the sanctions to cease support to the RUF [Revolutionary United Front]. When you have a rebel group being supported actively by a neighbouring country it becomes extremely difficult for the issues involved to be resolved because you have an external factor fuelling the internal conflict. And since the mandate of any UN peacekeeping mission is always confined to the country concerned, you cannot deal with the external factor even if it were a neighbouring nation. Q: Has it been worth your time being here? A: The success of UNAMSIL has not just been worth my time - how much is my time worth anyhow? It has been worth the investment of the UN. It has made a whole lot of difference in people's attitude henceforth to UN peacekeeping missions. What it has showed is that failure is not inevitable for a UN mission. It requires a lot of effort on the part of those on the ground and on the part of the Security Council to provide what is required to do the job. You cannot do peacekeeping half-heartedly, particularly this new generation of peacekeeping, which is only peacekeeping in name because it involves peacemaking and peace building. If you have to deal with these three simultaneously, then you have to be conscious of the fact that it will demand a lot more resources. You cannot economise on it otherwise it will fail.