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A three-day national consultative conference aimed at charting the way forward for Sierra Leone is underway in the capital, Freetown, but opposition politicians have expressed doubts that it will be able to achieve much, a media source told IRIN on Wednesday.
More than 250 delegates from different parts of Sierra Leone, including government officials, former rebels, political leaders and members of the civil society are attending the conference, organised by the National Committee for Democracy and Human Rights and scheduled to end on Thursday. Opening the meeting on Tuesday, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General, Oluyemi Adeniji, said its success depended "not only on the range of constituencies involved, but also on the extent to which the conference is focused, as well as by the civility of the exchanges the conference generates".
In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, Information Minister Cecil Blake said that the outcome of the conference would not be binding on the government. According to the media source, opposition delegates feared the meeting might "just be an opportunity for the government to explain and try and seek consensus on the proposed district block system of voting".
Under this system, candidates will be elected as representatives of their districts whereas elections in 1996 were held under the proportional representation system in which seats are allocated to each party according to the percentage of votes it receives nationwide, he explained.
A local NGO, Grassroots Awareness Organisation, attempted to hold a peaceful demonstration against the conference on Tuesday, calling for the setting of up of a transitional government to create a "level playing field" before elections slated for May next year, but police managed to keep them at bay, the source said.
Sierra Leone is now emerging from a decade of war between the state and the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in which thousands died, were maimed by rebels, or suffered displacement. There was heavy damage to infrastructure during the war, which also rendered some parts of the country off-limits to representatives of the state.
State authority is gradually being restored to such areas as a result of a disarmament process interrupted in 2000 and resumed in mid-2001.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
