Environmentalists report illegal logging

A Liberian environmental group has reported illegal timber exports fromin the rebel-controlled southeastof the country in contravention of the UN sanctions. The Save My Future Foundation (SAMFU)issued a four-page report this week accusing the locally owned Tobga Timber Company (TTCO) of felling, sawing and exporting timber illegally from Maryland county on the border with Cote d'Ivoire in complicity with the MODEL rebel movement. SAMFU said TTCO had been seen shipping wood out of the port of Harper days before a peace agreement last August ended 14 years of civil war. The company's sawmills and plywood factory in Maryland county were continuing to operate, it added. "Our monitors in Maryland County reported that on August 12, 2003, the Togba Timber Company (TTCO) in collaboration with MODEL, exported 771 pieces of assorted round logs amounting to 2616.86 cubic meters and 190 bundles of sawn timbers amounting to 279.294 cubic meters to Dakar, Senegal on the vessel 'Angelina Fighters'", SAMFU said. "The TTCO is also still felling and sawing logs in its plywood factory in Pubaken, Maryland County", it stated. Togba is an Liberian family name. SAMFU gave no further details about the company and. IRIN could not find any record of it in the register of logging companies held by Liberia's Forestry Development Authority (FDA) in Monrovia. James Makor, programme director of SAMFU, told IRIN on Thursday that his group's monitors had found processed sawn timber stored in TTCO's warehouses in Harper awaiting shipment. "Our fear is that if UNMIL [UN peacekeepers] are not deployed in Maryland as soon as possible, those processed logs our monitors saw in the port warehouses would be exported against the UN sanctions on timber", Makor said. SAMFU said its assessment mission found no evidence of logging activities in River Gee, Sinoe and Grand Gedeh counties elsewhere in the densely forested southeast of Liberia. The entire region is controlled by MODEL (Movement for Democracy in Liberia). Under the former government of president Charles Taylor, who held office from 1997 until August last year, large-scale logging activities were carried out throughout the southeast. Taylor was forced to step down go into exile in Nigeria as a result of US-led international pressure rebel attacks on the capital, Monrovia and may companies that had operated under his government, left with him. Eugene Wilson, a senior official of MODEL who is now Managing Director of the FDA in Liberia's transitional government, said he would investigate the SAMFU report. "If we have evidence of any company engaging in logging business such as what was cited in the SAMFU report, we will make the case retroactive, the company will face the full weight of the law where its concession agreement will be revoked", Wilson said. In May 2003, the Security Council imposed a ban on the exportation of Liberian timber after evidence that Taylor was using income from wood sales to buy weaponry in contravention of a UN arms embargo. Two years earlier the United Nations had banned diamond sales by Liberia and had placed a travel ban on several key officials in Taylor's government. SAMFU was founded in June 1987 by a Liberian Catholic priest.It won the Sting and Trudy Styler Award for the Environment and Human Rights from the Whitley Laing Foundation of the United Kingdom.