Monrovia offers challenge

Liberia has challenged the international community to prove its claims that President Charles Taylor is involved in diamond and arms smuggling to Sierra Leonean dissidents.

At the UN in New York on Thursday, Liberian Foreign Minister Monnie Captan rebutted the allegations, contained in a recent report by a UN panel investigating arms-for-diamonds deals between Liberia and Sierra Leonean rebels. Relations between Taylor and Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front have been strong since the start of Liberia’s civil war in 1989.

“What we have rejected,” Captan said, “is that that relationship, following our general election, has been translated into one where active support has been given to the RUF to continue its war efforts in Sierra Leone.”

Liberia recently grounded all aircraft operating under its flag and proposed a regime, similar to that drawn up for Sierra Leone, to monitor and regulate the sale of its diamonds. These measures, Captan said, were in no way inconsistent with Liberia’s rejection of the UN report that accuses Monrovia of using Liberian-registered aircraft for the illegal trade.

Many of the aircraft were registered during the civil war and while a transitional government ruled Liberia so, Captan said, “we do not have records of some of the aircraft flying our flag.”

Liberia has also proposed that UN monitors be stationed at its airports to verify if the country is violating UN arms sanctions. Captan said multilateral sanctions would create a large hole in the country’s US $100-million budget. That money meets expenditure on salaries, the upkeep of hospitals, schools, clinics sanitation programmes and, he said, “everything a government needed to operate”.

The British acting charge d’affaires, Stewart Eldon, said on Thursday in New York that the sanctions contained in a draft resolution now before the UN Security Council had been “carefully crafted to have minimal consequences for ordinary Liberians while making Liberian support for the RUF more difficult”.

The measures, he said, “include a ban on Liberian rough diamonds, a ban on flights by Liberian-registered aircraft, a new arms embargo, a selective travel ban on senior Liberian officials and a ban on the import of Liberian timber”.

The draft resolution is sponsored by Britain and the United States.