UN peacekeepers deploy near Sierra Leone border

United Nations peacekeepers extended their deployment to Liberia’s western border with Sierra Leone at the weekend, a UN spokesman said on Monday. Patrick Coker, a spokesman for the United Nations mission in Liberia, (UNMIL) told IRIN that Namibian troops were deployed to Sinje, Gbah and Tienne in Grand Cape Mount County. All three towns lie on the main road from Monrovia to the Sierra Leone border. “We have successfully deployed to those towns and the troops moved in robustly,” Coker said. Prior to the deployment of the UN peacekeepers, the main rebel group, the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), occupied all of Grand Cape Mount County. Asked when the troops would establish positions along the frontier itself, Coker replied, “We will eventually move to the borders”. UNMIL said last week that it would not resume its suspended disarmament program in Liberia until UN peacekeeping troops are fully deployed right across the West African country. Souren Seradayrian, the deputy head of UNMIL, said that this was one of three pre-conditions for disarmament to resume, which had been firmly agreed with the country's three warring factions. Seradayrian declined to give a firm date for the resumption of disarmament, following a false start in early December, but he said the full deployment of UNMIL troops throughout Liberia would be completed "sometime in March." There currently 11,500 troops out of the 15,000 peacekeepers authorised by the UN Security Council for Liberia in September.