May 19, 2001
For once the United Nations has got there before the television cameras. An investigating team, sent by Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary-general, presented its report to the Security Council on Monday. It found a large chunk of West Africa at war with itself and starkly warned of the "rapid spread of insecurity and instability, unless urgent steps are taken to address the causes of conflict and turmoil." The steps it recommends--everything from more debt relief to freeing child soldiers--are mostly unrealistic, but at least the UN has sounded the alarm. On the critical list are Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, but they could be joined by Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Guinea-Bissau and the Casamance region of Senegal.
Liberia has yet to recover from an eight-year civil war that supposedly ended in 1997. Sierra Leone has been engulfed in civil war for ten years. Now these wars have merged, to become a single regional war. Put simply, Liberia supports rebels in the other two and Guinea supports rebels in Liberia. But the causes are also internal. Poverty and fighting have produced thousands of ill-educated, frustrated young people who are easily recruited into a life of murder, rape and looting.
Most of the 15m people in the three countries are impoverished by war and its attendant hunger and disease. Nearly half a million refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia are trapped in Guinea, preyed on by rebels from all three countries and the Guinean army. The UN says their plight will worsen.
The UN is hampered because, apart from Britain, no permanent member of the Security Council wants to get involved. France, the former colonial power in Guinea, disagrees with British policy; America is standing back. A concerted effort is needed, first, to stiffen the UN force, second, to help the victims, and, third, to resume the search for a political solution.
Peacekeeping in the region has already been discredited. This time last year hundreds of poorly-led, ill-trained UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone were taken hostage by rebels in defiance of the peace treaty signed the year before. Britain sent troops to secure the capital and has kept on some 600 soldiers to train a new army. But it refuses to get further involved and, despite giving the UN force financial and logistical support, it will not put its troops under UN command. The UN mandate, drawn up to monitor the peace agreement, has not been strengthened for fear that countries with troops already there might pull them out. Yet, even with its existing mandate, the force could move more aggressively into rebel areas. In particular, the Security Council should authorise and pay for a force to protect the refugees in Guinea.
At present the task of making peace is being left to the regional organisation, the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS. Its record is mixed. Its members, each with its own national interest in the region, do not speak with one voice. Plainly, the job of brokering peace should be undertaken by the Security Council with the involvement of ECOWAS, not the other way round.
This is a good time for talking--even if it means talking to murderers and crooks. In Sierra Leone the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels know they cannot take the capital. They still occupy about half the country including lucrative diamond fields, but they have committed fewer atrocities of late, have apparently agreed to disarm, and last week released 88 child soldiers from their ranks and promised to set free more. Parts of the RUF seem willing to take part in an election scheduled for later this year (see article). Much depends on President Charles Taylor of Liberia, who has hitherto behaved more like a warlord than an elected leader. With luck, however, the sanctions just imposed by the UN may weaken his guns-for-diamonds trade with the RUF. Time to get serious
But little will be achieved by talking if the glint of steel is not flashing in the background. The UN force needs more troops from more countries if it is to be effective. Rich countries unwilling to contribute can, and should, train and equip peacekeepers from other countries. The stronger the force, the less likely it is to suffer casualties--and the more likely that the talkers will believe outsiders genuinely want this war to end.
