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Former rebel group urges UN to lift travel ban

    ABIDJAN

    The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which waged a ten-year war against central authority in Sierra Leone, has asked the United Nations to lift a 1998 travel ban on its officials as it transforms into a political party ahead of general elections set for 14 May, the UN Mission in Sierra Leone reported Friday.

    RUF Party Secretary-General Pallo Bangura and another official, Mike Lamin, made the request at a meeting on Thursday with the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Operations and Management in Sierra Leone, Behrooz Sadry.

    "According to Bangura, the travel ban was hindering the activities of the RUFP as the country moves closer to the presidential and parliamentary elections," UNAMSIL reported.

    "Of Immediate concern to the RUFP was a temporary lifting of the ban to enable its chief of administration Jonathan Kposowa, and Lamin to travel to Senegal to meet with the chairman of the Economic Community of West African States on party business," UNAMSIL added.

    The travel ban was part of a set of measures designed to compel the RUF to renounce war and hand its guns.

    In the letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan requesting that be ban be lifted, Bangura also asked for the government to establish the trust fund to transform the RUF to a political party, under the terms of the Lome Peace Agreement of 1999.

    Bangura said the RUFP had opened officers in the town of Bo, Kenema, and Makeni and would formally register the party next week.

    Meanwhile, the former US ambassador to Sierra Leone, Joseph Melrose, told a US Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee in a statement on Wednesday that RUF mined diamonds were still being sold, in contravention to a UN ban on conflict diamonds, Sierra Leone Web, a US-based Internet News service provider, reported.

    It reported Melrose as saying that the RUF's diamonds, at least in part during Sierra Leone's ten-year civil war, were currently being sold in Guinea to raise funds for the RUF in the upcoming elections.

    [For Sierra Leonean Web story see http://www.sierra-leone.org/slnews.html]
    [For Melrose's statement see http://www.sierra-leone.org/melrose021301.html]

    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

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