West African leaders vow to help defend peace process

Leaders of nine West African states ended a one-day summit in the Nigerian capital on Tuesday with a decision to use every means, including the military option, to defend Sierra Leone’s government and shore up its sagging peace process. In a communique issued at the end of the Abuja meeting, the ECOWAS heads condemned the detention of UN peacekeepers by Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF). They said President Charles Taylor of Liberia had been appointed to ensure that the RUF complies with the terms of a peace agreement it signed with the government in Lome , Togo, on 7 July 1999, and frees the estimated 500 hostages. Lansana Kouyate, executive secretary of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), who read out the communique, said ECOWAS was ready for the military option because of its “unshakeable determination to restore peace to Sierra Leone by all means”. In this regard, a meeting of ECOWAS military chiefs has been scheduled in Abuja for 17 May to discuss the modalities of the possible redeployment to Sierra Leone - if necessary - of the ECOWAS Peace Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). Describing the detention of UN troops as “a deliberate violation of the Lome peace agreement which has been painstakingly negotiated”, the leaders said the rebels were running the risk of having their amnesty revoked and of being tried for war crimes. Present at Tuesday’s meeting were ECOWAS Chairman Alpha Omar Konare, who is also Mali’s president, Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, Cote d’Ivoire’s General Robert Guei and Guinea’s General Lansana Conte. Others were Liberia’s Charles Taylor, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone and Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo. Ghana and Burkina Faso were represented by their foreign ministers. The communique was silent on a US request for the immediate deployment of Nigerian troops to Sierra Leone. Senior Nigerian officials said although Obasanjo was willing to deploy troops immediately, he was in favour of the international community financing most of the operation. Nigeria had contributed the majority of the troops of the ECOMOG force which restored Kabbah to power in 1998 after he was toppled by a military junta, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). The AFRC, which was joined by the RUF during its nine-month reign, fled to the bush when it was ousted. When, in January 1999, a combined AFRC/RUF force overran Freetown, it was again ECOMOG that drove them out.