US envoy asked to intervene in disarmament dispute

Gyude Bryant, the leader of Liberia's transitional government, has asked US ambassador John Blaney to persuade the former warring parties in the country to allow a UN-supervised process of disarmament to start as planned next week, a senior government source said on Friday. The official start of disarmament next Monday was thrown into doubt after the representatives of all three armed factions walked out of the inaugural meeting of the National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration on Thursday. They handed Bryant and the UN supremo in Liberia, Jacques Klein, who were due to co-chair the meeting, a document saying that the armed factions would not hand in their guns until a dispute over the share-out of top government jobs had been settled. The government source told IRIN that the followers of former president Charles Taylor and the LURD and MODEL rebel movements were demanding the lion's share of 86 assistant minister posts. They also wanted deputy head role in a dozen public corporations, such as the Liberian Petroleum Refining Company, the National Ports Authority and the Bureau of Maritime Affairs, which manages the Liberian shipping register, he added. However, the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) rejected outright any linkage between disarmament and the award of government jobs and stated its determination to press ahead with the official launch of the disarmament process on Monday, as planned. The Implementation Monitoring Committee (IMC), a body set up to monitor the August peace agreement which ended 14 years of civil war in Liberia, made clear on Friday that disarmament could not be linked to the distribution of jobs. The committee, which is chaired jointly by the United Nations and and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), said in a statement: "The IMC stresses that there can be no link between the distribution of posts within the (government) and public corporations on the one hand and the implementation of the DDRR (Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration) programme." It accused the leaders of the warring factions who were threatening to hold up the disarmament process of showing "complete disregard for their own combatants and for the citizens of Liberia who are longing for the reconstruction of their war-torn country." UNMIL meanwhile sent out press invitations to a ceremony on Monday at which Bryant and Klein are due to formally launch the disarmament process with the symbolic destruction of some weapons already surrendered. UN peacekeepers plan to actually start disarming former government soldiers and rebels of LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy) and MODEL (Movement for Democracy in Liberia) on 7 December. However, UNMIL military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Borje Johannson, admitted on Friday that UN troops had not yet begun setting up two of the three demobilisation camps where combatants are due to hand in their weapons and registering themselves for assistance to return to civilian life. Johannson told IRIN that UN peacekeepers were already present in Schefflin military barracks between Monrovia and Roberts international airport, where former government soldiers will be processed. But he said the blue helmets had yet to establish a presence in the LURD stronghold of Tubmanburg, 60 km northwest of Monrovia, or the MODEL-controlled port city of Buchanan, where the rebels are due to be disarmed. "As soon as possible we will be in Buchanan and Tubmanburg, but I don't want to give a time," Johannson said. The UNMIL military spokesman said there just over 5,000 UNMIL peacekeepers in Liberia at present, correcting a statement earlier this week that about 6,500 had arrived. The force is due to reach its full strength of 15,000 in late February or March. The United Nations estimates that about 38,000 former combatants will report for disarmament over the coming five or six months. UN officials did not say how they proposed to bring the armed factions back on board the disarmament process, but Blamo Nelson, an advisor of Bryant, said the leader of the interim government was prepared to hold discussions with them to resolve the matter. "The initial response of chairman Bryant is to continue efforts to reach out to our brothers who are providing the leadership for the factions. There are areas of misunderstanding here and we will simply sit down and review those issues and move forward," Nelson told IRIN. He hinted that the coveted assistant minister posts might not be created at all, saying they would simply create "a large and unnecessary bureaucracy." Klein, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative to Liberia, accused the armed factions of simply demanding these jobs for "personal gain and self-agrandizement." But MODEL's top military commander, Boi Blehjue Boi, held firm. "We want our demands met by Gyude Bryant before we take part in any discussion," he said. A senior LURD official, who asked not to be named, told IRIN: "LURD is not refusing to disarm, but we want the government to be fully seated and this is not the case now with the absence of some of our representatives." A West African diplomat said that ECOWAS, which helped to negotiate the August peace agreement, should hold an urgent consultative meeting before the row over government jobs developed into a bigger problem. Under the terms of the peace agreement, the warring parties were allocated 15 of the 21 ministers in the government and the chairmanship of several public corporations. But the accord made no specific provision for the allocation of government jobs immediately below these levels.