UN team sanctions team ends visits

A five-man UN team ended on Monday a week-long visit to Liberia to assess the degree to which the government was complying with a UN resolution calling for an end to its support for anti-government forces in Sierra Leone, a UN official told IRIN. The mission, headed by Martin Chungong Ayafor of Cameroon, comprised specialists on arms trafficking, transport, diamond sales, civil aviation and international crime. They visited the Gbartala anti-terrorist training base in central Liberia where, it is generally believed, dissidents operating against Sierra Leone and Guinea are trained. UN applied sanctions on Liberia on 7 May after Monrovia failed to show that it had complied with the Security Council’s demands that it stop supporting Sierra Leone’s anti-government Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and trading arms-for-diamonds with the dissidents. The UN measure includes a prohibition on the direct and indirect import of all rough diamonds from Liberia, as well as a travel ban on senior government officials and their spouses. An existing UN arms embargo on Liberia has been extended. Two days before the imposition of sanctions, Liberian President Charles Taylor described the measure as “unjust and illegitimate”, saying it was taken without consideration of the views of the Organization of African Unity - the continent’s foremost political body - and the Economic Community of West African States. Liberia has consistently denied its involvement in destabilising its neighbours and arms-for-diamond dealings with RUF.