Villagers complain of harassment by MODEL in River Cess county

Villagers in River Cess county, a remote region of central Liberia, have complained of continued harassment by fighters of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), five months after the rebel group signed a peace deal. “On Sunday night, a group of 50 MODEL fighters just entered Timbo village and ordered everyone to come out, then they entered our homes and took away our food, pots and some money some of us were keeping,” 69-year old, David Tukpa, told IRIN on Thursday. Tukpa was one of twenty village elders from Timbo in River Cess County who made the 150 km journey to the capital Monrovia in early January to lodge a complaint with the transitional government and the MODEL leadership. They returned to Monrovia this week to complain that the harassement by MODEL fighters was continuing. Speaking in Liberian English, David Myers, another elder form the group told IRIN: “We filed a complain to the MODEL leadership in Monrovia two weeks ago and up to present, the fighters are still harassing us.” Tukpa said the MODEL fighters causing the problems had come from the port city of Buchanan, 120km from Monrovia. This is a MODEL stronghold, but United Nations peacekeeping troops established a presence there at the end of December. “Most of the times the fighters set up checkpoints around afternoon and evening hours along the road leading to the towns and villages and ask civilians to take stand on line and demand money before anyone passes through a checkpoint,” Tukpa explained. Villagers from Picnecess in Grand Kru County in southeastern Liberia, close to the border with Cote d’Ivoire, have made similar complaints. “The MODEL are giving us hard times in Picnecess. They are just going around from town to town beating up people and taking our cows”, their spokesman, Joseph Nagbe-Wreh told IRIN. Nabge-Wreh, who had also come to Monrovia to complain the MODEL leadership, explained that it was common for rebels to come into a village and demand to be fed by the impoverished residents. MODEL’s Acting Chief of Staff, General Nelson Paye, told IRIN on Thursday that he was looking into the complaints. “We dispatched a team to the county on Monday comprising of top commanders to investigate the complaints and if we found them true, the appropriate actions will be taken against those involved,” said Paye. Paye did not detail what those “appropriate actions” might be. MODEL emerged as a rebel group in March last year as an offshoot from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), the main rebel movement. It rapidly siezed control of southern and eastern Liberia. Diplomats said MODEL received strong backing from Cote d'Ivoire. UN peacekeepers have deployed to the MODEL stronghold-towns of Buchanan in Grand Bassa and Zwedru in Grand Gedeh. However, beyond these towns, most of the countryside remains under MODEL control. The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) currently has just over 10,000 peacekeeping groups on the ground. Jacques Klein, the head of UNMIL, said on Wednesday they had been instructed to intensify their patrols. He also pledged that UNMIL would reach its full strength of 15,000 men by the end of February or early March. Human Rights Watch criticised what it described as the “slow” deployment of UN peacekeepers in Liberia in a report earlier this month. The New York-based watchdog said research carried out in October and November 2003 revealed that former combatants from all three armed factions in Liberia were still looting and raping civilians and obliging them to undertake forced labour.