UN provides crash training for 400 police officers

United Nations police officers on Monday launched the first of a series of two-week intensive courses to retrain 400 Liberian policemen. Mark Kroeker, the UN police commissioner in Liberia, said at a ceremony at the start of the first course for 24 policemen and one woman: "We are here to be of service to your police force, to help them to become what everybody had wanted them to be - the finest police force in this region." Last week, Kroeker told reporters that the interim police force would be trained in human rights, rule of law and democratic principles. The United Nations has agreed to send 1,115 international policemen to Liberia to totally restructure and retrain the country's discredited police force, which had become a by-word for corruption and brutality. So far just over 100 have arrived in the country. They will work alongside 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops. The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) said in a statement that the Interim Police Training Course would provide provisional training to current members of the police force while the long-range vetting and training of candidates for a new Liberian National Police Service was being prepared. Two months ago, Jacques Klein, the head of UNMIL, said he planned to demobilise all of Liberia's 3,500 to 4,000 existing policemen in order recruit and train a new force from scratch. However, that was before the arrival of Kroeker, a veteran US police chief from Los Angeles, who earlier served as deputy commander of the UN police force in Bosnia. Since Kroeker took up his post in early November he has talked instead of "transforming" the existing police force in Liberia during the run-up to fresh elections in October 2005. Liberian police director Chris Massaquoi revealed on Monday that he was closely working with UNMIL to formulate a long-term programme to train the national police. Public confidence in the police was eroded under the regime of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor, who is now in exile in Nigeria. Local human rights groups accused the police of brutality, torture and extrajudicial killings. The police also fought alongside militias loyal to Taylor during the latter stages of Liberia's 14-year civil war, which was brought to an end by a peace agreement in August 2003.