ACCRA, June 23: Liberia’s main rebel faction said on Monday it would boycott negotiations designed to end West Africa’s bloodiest war, throwing already shaky peace efforts into further confusion.
The boycott follows a row between the rebels and President Charles Taylor’s government over the exact meaning of a ceasefire accord they signed in Ghana last week.
The deal gave the rebels and Liberian politicians 30 days to seek a comprehensive peace agreement and discuss the creation of a transitional government without Taylor.
Taylor said after the agreement that he would not quit before the end of his term in January 2004.
Two rebel factions want him to step down much sooner and accuse regional mediators, desperate to end a war that has sown chaos across West Africa, of favouring the government’s interpretation of the accord.
“We are taking a decision to stay away from all proceedings of the ongoing discussions until we can get a satisfactory assurance that no attempt will be made to circumvent the ceasefire agreement,” the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) said in a statement.
They said it did not mean they would no longer respect the ceasefire, though each side accuses the other of breaking it.
LURD singled out for criticism the top official of the ECOWAS regional bloc that is leading mediation efforts. It demanded that Mohamed ibn Chambas withdraw from the negotiations and accused him of acting like “Taylor’s foreign minister”.
Mediators say the wording of the ceasefire agreement signed last Tuesday was deliberately kept vague and that the timeframe of Taylor’s departure was still up for discussion. “We cannot drop it now or fighting will resume,” said one mediator. “It is hanging by a thread.”
Taylor’s fate is seen as key to ending 14 years of nearly non-stop war in Liberia and disarming an army of young, ruthless fighters roaming across the regions’ porous borders.
The Liberian leader’s options look limited. A United Nations-backed war crimes court has indicted him for his role in Sierra Leone and rebels got within five km (three miles) of downtown Monrovia this month before being pushed back.
Adding to growing international pressure on Taylor, Switzerland ordered local banks on Monday to freeze accounts belonging to him and his associates.
Taylor was elected with an overwhelming majority in 1997 after emerging victorious from a seven-year civil war which killed 200,000 people.
LURD, which includes many of his old foes, took up arms against him in 2000. LURD and another rebel faction known as Model control about 60 percent of Liberia.
PRESIDENT’S ACCOUNTS FROZEN: Swiss authorities have ordered banks in Switzerland to block any accounts belonging to Liberia’s President Charles Taylor and his associates, following a request from the UN-backed court investigating war crimes in Sierra Leone, the justice ministry said on Monday.
Taylor is accused by the Special Court for Sierra Leone of providing financial and military support to two rebel groups “and aiding them in their attacks on the civilian population during the civil war in Sierra Leone”, the ministry said in a statement.
The Liberian leader, currently under pressure to step down from rebel forces who have battled their way to the edge of the capital Monrovia, is said to have received uncut diamonds in return for his support.
“He is claimed to have invested the proceeds from the diamond sales in a number of countries, including Switzerland,” the ministry added.
Swiss banks have declared about 2.1 billion Swiss Francs ($1.5 billion) in deposits belonging to private and public interests in Liberia, one of Africa’s poorest countries, according to data from Switzerland’s central bank.
The Sierra Leone court estimated that Taylor had pocketed several hundred million dollars worth of diamonds, and some the money might have found its way to Switzerland, Swiss justice ministry spokesman Folco Galli said.
The freeze targets deposits that might belong to Taylor, members of his regime and “various business people and companies” which were not named.
Banks in Geneva and Zurich were ordered to freeze accounts but the justice ministry said it did not yet have any indication on the amount of money frozen.
The provisional step, normally taken ahead of any public announcement to prevent money from being withdrawn out of the accounts, precedes a full-blooded investigation by the Swiss federal prosecutor’s office, the statement said.
Authorities have been probing Liberian-owned accounts in Switzerland since a report by an environmental watchdog, Global Witness, last month highlighted links between Liberian timber exports and the embargo-busting arms trade in west Africa, a Swiss newspaper reported on Monday.
The illegal trade led the United Nations security council to pass a new sanctions resolution last month banning all trade in timber from Liberia, in addition to existing bans on diamonds and arms from the strife-torn country.
Money earned from the timber trade has been used to finance arms bought in eastern Europe and Libya, with Swiss bank accounts acting as staging points for the assets, according to Global Witness.—Reuters/AFP
