Nigeria to withdraw 2,000 troops from ECOMOG

Nigeria announced on Wednesday it would withdraw 2,000 troops from the West African Peace Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) serving in Liberia by the end of August, news reports said. Nigerian Information Minister Dapo Sarumi told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting that more troops would leave in September. Nigeria fields an estimated 12,000 of the 15,000 strong ECOMOG force, Reuters reported. Nigeria's newly installed democratic president, Olusegun Obasanjo, campaigned partly on a platform to pull troops out of Sierra Leone because of Nigeria's financial difficulties. Nigeria has also announced deep cuts in military manpower, to trim the defence budget. Nigeria, West Africa's most economically and militarily powerful country, has largely led ECOMOG and provided most of the men, materiel and money for the force ever since it was first deployed, in Liberia, in 1990. Following democratic elections there, ECOMOG was redeployed to Sierra Leone to support its elected government against the RUF. The RUF, which fought successive governments in Sierra Leone, has now been bought into government under a peace agreement signed in Lome on 7 July. ECOMOG had no part in brawl Meanwhile, ECOMOG has criticised two media protection bodies for trying to implicate the force in unbecoming conduct in Sierra Leone. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in New York, and Reporters Sans Frontier (RSF) in Paris, charged that an ECOMOG officer stood by as three RUF members beat up the editor of `For Di People', a Freetown newspaper, and ransacked the premises. CPJ and RSF said the rebels had taken offence to an article published in the newspaper on Monday saying the RUF had demanded money from the government for staying in Freetown and then wasted it. ECOMOG spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Olukolade told IRIN on Thursday: "This was a scuffle between the RUF and the editor. ECOMOG had no part in it." He said the ECOMOG officer was simply escorting an RUF "leader", under the terms of the Lome agreement, and was not supposed to get involved physically in a "heated debate". This was a police case and such channels of law and order exist in Sierra Leone, he said. "I have spoken to both parties (the newspaper editor and the RUF men involved) and they said that the ECOMOG officer tried to pacify them," Olukolade said. He blamed what he saw as a misrepresentation of the incident on some local journalists "bent on disgracing" as many institutions as possible in a desperate attempt to seek asylum abroad.