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The international environmental watchdog, Global Witness, appealed on Monday in an open letter to a Danish company, DLH Nordisk, to stop buying ‘conflict timber’ from Liberian companies.
"UN Expert Panel reports named several Liberian based logging companies for their direct links with the region's long running and bloody conflict. DLH, amongst other European timber buyers, continues to purchase timber from these logging companies, several of which are directly involved in prolonging conflict in West Africa," the letter said.
Liberia's logging industry, Global Witness said, is being used by the country’s president, Charles Taylor, "as a platform to prolong regional violence, traffic arms, and reap significant extra-budgetary income while destroying the country's forests and re-directing funds that should be going to the Liberian people".
In July 2001, it added, "DLH pledged to stop buying timber from the Oriental Timber Company and Royal Timber Corporation . But despite strong environmental claims on their website, and being corporate members of Amnesty International Denmark, the company continued to purchase this conflict timber."
Global Witness, a joint nominee for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, is a British based non-governmental organisation, which focuses on the links between environmental and human rights abuses, especially the impact of natural resource exploitation on countries and people. In the past it has highlighted the use of timber, oil and diamonds, to fund conflicts and regimes in Angola, Cambodia, Liberia and Zimbabwe.
Liberia's forests, it said, are regarded as one of the world's 25 biodiversity "hotspots".
[For more details go to www.globalwitness.org]
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