LIBERIA: U.N. Official Calls Aid to West Africa “Pathetic”

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 1995 (IPS) - International donors have virtually ignored humanitarian crises in Liberia and Sierra Leone, a U.N. official said after visiting the two Western African states last week.

Peter Hansen, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, said both countries have received less than half the aid pledged to them in recent months, even though the amount the United Nations is seeking has been low compared to crises in Rwanda and the Balkans.

Several African leaders, including Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings and Liberian transitional leader Wilton Sankawulo, are lobbying here for Liberia to receive 110 million dollars in aid. Sierra Leone, meanwhile, has received only 40 percent of a recent 14-million-dollar appeal for help in its ongoing civil war, Hansen said.

“It is really pathetic to see that type of response when you compare it to the enormous needs,” he added.

Hansen said that both countries are in dire shape, with Liberia experiencing its first real hope of peace after nearly six years of war. Liberia’s suffering, he noted, was comparable in proportion to Rwanda’s: 150,000 out of a total population of two million died in the war, while three out of four people were displaced internally or to other countries.

Yet the conflicts have never gained serious international attention, Hansen argued, noting “the distance of these conflicts from the main centres of strategical and economic interests.”

But “human suffering is human suffering, whether it takes place in Western Africa, Central Africa or Yugoslavia,” he said.

That is a lesson many Western African leaders have sought to underscore in recent days. Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly on its fiftieth anniversary, Rawlings lambasted richer nations for favouring humanitarian and peacekeeping projects in Europe but not Africa.

“We cannot help being struck by the fact that the international community is willing to spend five million dollars a day on U.N. peacekeeping operations in Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Rawlings said. “But when we have asked for a sum that represents 10 to 15 days of that bill to help those of us in Africa making every possible effort to assist ourselves with our meagre resources, there is deafening silence.”

Liberia has been a case in point, with many African diplomats here fighting to maintain a small U.N. peacekeeping mission, called UNOMIL, which the Security Council seemed sure to cancel.

Last month was slated to be the 70-member UNOMIL’s last. But the 13th peace agreement by the country’s leaders of the country’s main warring factions gathered in Abuja, Nigeria, put off the operation’s final exit.

Now the Security Council has extended the peacekeepers until January 1996. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in a report released Thursday, has asked the Council to expand the force as well, so that UNOMIL can support basic humanitarian activities and support the regional ECOMOG peacekeepers.

ECOMOG, dominated by Nigeria but comprising troops from several mainly Western African states, is seeking to expand its present troop strength of 7,200 to about 12,000 troops. African leaders argue the force will need that many soldiers to oversee the demobilisation of between 60,000 and 80,000 Liberian fighters in the coming months.

Funds are needed especially to educate some 20,000 child soldiers who have fought in the Liberian war, Hansen said. Those children, he added, will also need psychological help.

But ECOMOG is short on cash, and several countries — including Uganda and Tanzania — left the force this summer following months of payment problems and skirmishes among the Liberians.

Boutros-Ghali argued that ECOMOG should be supported and that the U.N. operations, to be effective, should be expanded to 160 military observers.

“I am convinced that, notwithstanding the acute financial crisis currently facing the organisation, the provision of additional resources to UNOMIL, at a level that is modest by comparison with peacekeeping operations elsewhere, is justified by the hope that the Abuja Agreement at last offers a chance of ending the cruel war in Liberia,” Boutros-Ghali wrote.

But an expansion of resources is anything but easy to obtain. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright recently cited the Liberia operation specifically as one where lack of concrete progress and the cost of indefinite U.N. involvement might leave it vulnerable to cancellation.

“We have been patient, but patience must have a purpose,” she said.

So far, the past two months have been encouraging. Sanakawulo was sworn in last month as head of a transitional government that includes all the main faction leaders, including Charles Taylor, head of the main rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), as a vice-president.

Although reports of fighting near the NPFL stronghold, Gbranga, have continued in recent weeks, Hansen characterised most of the fighting as “skirmishes.” Boutros-Ghali said UNOMIL will investigate the recent clashes.