Riots kill 16, delay repatriation of refugees

Aid workers have been forced to suspend plans to bring Liberian refugees back home after riots in the capital Monrovia killed at least 16 people in the worst outbreak of violence the West African country has witnessed since its civil war ended a year ago.

The trouble first erupted on Thursday evening, triggered by a land dispute in the eastern suburb of Paynesville that quickly escalated into mob violence, with youths wielding sticks, knives and broken bottles and setting fire to cars and buildings.

Liberia's transitional government imposed a curfew, but the running battles resumed on Sunday, a day peace was supposed to dominate the headlines as former fighters handed in their weapons on the final day of the country's disarmament programme.

The UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) said on Monday that 16 people had died during the riots. Another 208 people had been injured, 47 of them seriously.

"Most major hospitals... are filled with wounded people," one medic at Monrovia's main hospital told IRIN, adding that the majority had been injured by sharp metal objects and stones.

UNMIL said 250 people had been arrested, some for murder, some for arson and some for breaking the curfew.

With the capital unstable, the United Nations temporarily halted plans to begin repatriating the first batch of Liberian refugees from Guinea and to start resettling those that had been displaced around Liberia.

"We are suspending our entire planned repatriation programme for both refugees and internally displaced people because of the prevailing security situation in Monrovia," Francesca Fontanini, the spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in Liberia, told IRIN.

Some 300,000 Liberians, who fled their homes during the 14-year civil war, have been living in a ring of camps around the capital. Starting on Monday, UNHCR had been hoping to help about a third of them back to their villages by the end of December but officials did not say whether that target was now threatened.

Another 350,000 fled beyond Liberia's borders to seek safety. In Guinea, some 200 Liberian refugees who were looking forward to returning home this weekend were told they would have to wait a while longer.

"Events in the country.... did not appear safe and it is against our policy to repatriate refugees to a country which is not considered safe," a UNCHR official in the Guinean capital, Conakry, told IRIN on Saturday.

The recent violence means some Liberians will have to wait a bit longer to go home

Guinea, itself teetering on the brink of instability, is host to the largest number of Liberian refugees. The UN says some 58,000 are currently living there.

Liberia is struggling to rebuild after 14 years of civil war, which destroyed already creaky infrastructure across the heavily-forested nation and crippled its economy.

The UN says some 95,000 ex-combatants have been disarmed under its programme, more than double the number expected. But critics point out that only one in three of those disarmed has actually handed in a weapon and officials have warned that there are insufficient funds to retrain those who have earned a living from violence for the last decade and a half.

Warning given

"The ex-combatants' overwhelming concentration in the over-congested capital, Monrovia, without job opportunities, poses a threat to national security," the UN and Liberia's transitional government said in a joint document submitted to international donors recently and seen by IRIN.

Early reports portrayed last week's clashes in Monrovia as religious, but government officials, diplomats and residents cast doubt on that theory, with many saying the blame should be laid at the door of rogue ex-combatants.

"We have found out that there are no Muslims burning churches and no Christians burning mosques," Gyude Bryant, the head of the transitional government, said in a radio address on Sunday. "We have already identified those behind it... and we will go after them," he said, without giving any more details.

UN envoy Jacques Klein was more blunt.

"What we're seeing is the death throes of the [old] regime," he told the BBC. "In the old days they used tribal differences which don't seem to be working now so now they've hit on religious differences."

Stephen Lincoln, a resident in the battle-scarred suburb of the capital, agreed that religion was masking political troubles between the rebel group Liberians United Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), who come from the mainly Muslim Mandingo ethnic group and fighters loyal to former president Charles Taylor.

"Some boys who are former fighters of LURD, mainly Mandingos, are attacking another tribe's members who they perceive as Christians and in particular former fighters of Taylor," he said.

Witnesses told IRIN that UN peacekeepers had arrested some 80 people from the home of Philip Kamara, a former senior commander within LURD.

Heavily-armed UN peacekeepers -- part of some 15,000 blue hatted troops in the country -- were still patrolling parts of Monrovia, and although shops and banks reopened on Monday, schools stayed closed and many residents remained wary

UNMIL said relative calm had returned to the capital, but a curfew would remain in place from 4:00pm to 7:00am until further notice.

Diplomats worry that Liberia's slide back to violence might scare off international donors, who have already not provided all the funds that aid workers say are necessary to rebuild the country.

"Liberia cannot afford to revert back to those dark chapters of war and violence," Abdulsalami Abubakar, the Nigerian general who helped negotiate peace in Liberia, warned.