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LIBERIA: Fighting continues in parts of the northwest
Fighting between government troops and dissidents continued this week in Lofa County, northwestern Liberia, according to various reports. However, calm returned to parts of the adjacent county of Gbarpolu, enabling aid workers to go back to camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) from which they had pulled out.
In Lofa, the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) recaptured the towns of Foya and Belle Yella from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) dissidents, Radio Liberia International (RLI), a pro-government radio, reported on Friday. It said that in the fight for Foya, the AFL killed 27 members of the LURD, which has been fighting government forces in Lofa off and on since 1998.
RLI said a senior LURD commander was captured and two others were wounded. Government forces destroyed two troop carriers and anti-aircraft guns belonging to the rebels, it added. The radio station quoted Defence Minister Daniel Chea as saying that another town in Lofa, Kolahun, was partially occupied by dissidents and was being besieged by the Liberian armed forces.
However, the Deputy Minister of National Security, Emmet Ross, who is also a senior military intelligence officer, has been declared missing in action after a convoy in which he was travelling was ambushed in Lofa. Three of his junior officers are also missing, RLI said.
In Gbarpolu County, just south of Lofa, relief workers have returned to IDP camps which they had fled last week. Save the Children's Fund (SCF) went back to Bopolu camp after an SCF assessment team which went to the camp found that the situation had returned to normal, SCF programme director Jane Gibreel told IRIN. She said SCF had also gone back to Jenemanna camp.
Bopolu hosted about 2000 IDPs before last week's fighting. Their number has now been swollen by about 1,887 more people who fled clashes in areas farther north such as Belle Fassama, Gibreel said. Belle Fassama is 100 km north of Bopolu.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Kenzo Oshima expressed alarm this week about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gbarpolu. He said the displacement caused by the fighting had strained the Bopolu camp's already inadequate resources. Humanitarian agencies operating in Liberia do not have enough resources, he added, and might have to cease their operations at the end of the year. Oshima called on donors to fund the 2002 inter-agency humanitarian appeal for Liberia.
SIERRA LEONE: Uphill struggle for disarmament in the east
Pro-government Civil Defence Forces (CDF) militiamen continued to disarm this week in the districts of Kailahun and Kenema in eastern Sierra Leone. Former Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels began disarming in Kailahun, only to stop after two days.
Kenema and Kailahun are the last two districts that remain to be disarmed in Sierra Leone.
A total of 366 former fighters of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) handed over their weapons on Tuesday and Wednesday in Kailahun, UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) spokesperson Margaret Novicki told IRIN on Friday. However, they stopped abruptly for reasons which remained unclear although, according to Novicki, there may have been some confusion among rank-and-file RUF over whether or not they had been given the green light to disarm. "I believe they started without instructions from higher authorities and have now decided to wait," she said.
In Daru town, which is also in Kailahun District, 795 pro-government Civil Defence Forces (CDF) forces had disarmed as of Thursday, the UN reported.
In Kenema District, no RUF rebels had reported for disarmament in the diamond mining centre of Tongo Field, Novicki said. In Kenema Town, on the other hand, 147 CDF had disarmed as of Thursday. However, according to a BBC report on Thursday, some CDF were refusing to continue disarming in Kenema until eight of their colleagues, who are facing murder charges, were released.
RUF rebels in the east had refused to disarm because they were unhappy over a number of issues including the outcome of a recent National Consultative Conference and the continued detention of their leader, Foday Sankoh. UN officials were having discussions with rebel leaders to try and resolve outstanding issues "which we expect will be sorted out in the near future," Novicki said.
According to UNAMSIL, more than 37,000 ex-combatants in 10 of Sierra Leone's 12 districts have disarmed. At a meeting on Wednesday with Hans Dahlgren, the EU's special representative to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, senior UN official Oluyemi Adeniji said the most crucial task facing Sierra Leone was reintegrating ex-fighters into society.
Adeniji, who is the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Sierra Leone, appealed to international donors, including Canada and the European Union (EU), for help with the reintegration of former combatants, UNAMSIL reported. He also noted that funds were needed for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of roads, which would create jobs for ex-combatants.
Dahlgren pledged the EU's continued political support to UNAMSIL and financial assistance for Sierra Leone's disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programme, UNAMSIL reported.
Earlier in the week, Adeniji told a high-level Canadian delegation that the ex-combatants were receiving re-insertion benefits but that these were not enough. The visiting delegation was headed by Lt-Gen Romeo Dallaire, the Special Advisor on War-Affected Children to the Canadian Minister for International Cooperation.
Meanwhile, the Paris Club is to cancel about US $72 million dollars owed by Sierra Leone under a restructuring agreement expected to reduce the country's debt service to bilateral creditors for 1 October 2001 to 30 September 2004, from around US $180 million to about US $45 million.
GUINEA-BISSAU: Opposition sceptical about reported coup attempt
Guinea Bissau's government reported this week that it had foiled a coup attempt by members of the military but Internal Affairs Minister Alamara Nhasse failed to convince parliament on Wednesday that the alleged coup attempt actually did take place. Opposition members demanded instead that he produce evidence to back the government's claim, which he promised to do.
Nhasse gave no details of the number of people arrested in connection with the reported coup attempt, who were said to include a former deputy head of the armed forces, and a former head of the navy.
Portuguese media, including the Diario de Noticias daily and Lusa news agency, reported opposition leaders as expressing scepticism. "When plots are discussed, we soon think of invention and this is a device already used during the regime of Kumba Yala", an opposition source was quoted by LUSA as saying.
TOGO: Preparations for parliamentary elections underway
As preparations for parliamentary elections in March 2002 got underway in Togo, a review of voters' registers was scheduled to begin on Friday. The first round of the polls is to take place on 10 March, while the second would be held two weeks later. According to a presidential decree issued on Tuesday, the revision of the voters' rolls would continue until 16 December, news agencies reported. The polls are meant to replace a 1999 legislative election which the opposition boycotted after accusing the government of rigging a presidential poll in mid-1998.
NIGER: Grain surplus recorded, government says
Niger harvested a cereal surplus of nearly 300,000 mt this year, The PanAfrican News Agency (PANA) reported a government statement as saying. This contrasts strongly with a cereal deficit last year that affected more than one-third of Niger's 10 million inhabitants, forcing thousands of people to leave their villages in search of food.
NIGERIA: Niger Delta development to be discussed
The development of the Niger Delta is to come up for discussion at a major conference to be held in Port Harcourt, the main town in southeast Nigeria, on 10-12 December. Meanwhile, police in Rivers State, which is also part of the Delta, on Tuesday broke up a protest by the National Youth Council of Ogoni People (NYCOP) on the grounds that it was unauthorised. NYCOP was protesting against the inability of the state parliament and of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDCC) to deliver on promises to improve the lives of the state's people.
GUINEA: ADF support for sustainable social development
The African Development Fund (ADF) has approved a loan of about US $25.56 million and a grant of just under US $2.24 million for a sustainable social development project in Upper and Central Guinea.
The objective of the project is to help reduce poverty by supporting the implementation of Guinea's National Poverty Reduction Strategy and enhance governance at the local government level, the African Development Bank (ADB) said. It seeks to facilitate access by the poor to basic socio-economic services and develop productive capacities, especially those of women and youths.
The project will support 57 urban districts and rural communities in preparing and implementing sustainable development programmes. It will help build, rehabilitate and equip some 400 small community facilities and around 30 feeder roads, provide functional literacy education for 150,000 people, and train 1,000 groups in community life. Around 30,000 people are to receive training in entrepreneurship, appropriate technologies and micro-project management.
Some 80,000 poor people, 60 percent of them women and youths, will receive microcredits to carry out income-generating activities.
The ADF is part of the ADB group.
GHANA: Thousands displaced, many killed in communal clashes
Over 50 people were reported killed and many others injured between Sunday and Tuesday in fighting between members of rival ethnic groups in Bawku, northeastern Ghana, police in Accra told IRIN. Over 5,000 people fled the town, which is 880 km from Accra and has a population of 100,000. Property was also destroyed in the clashes, reportedly sparked by a dispute between two individuals. This week's incidents came just a year after clashes between the two groups during presidential and parliamentary polls in December 2000. According to the police, 30 people had died in last year's clashes.
WEST AFRICA: UN plans to set up West Africa office
The United Nations plans to establish a West Africa subregional office in Dakar, Senegal, in January for three years. It would be run by a Special Representative of the Secretary-General for West Africa.
"Among its tasks, the Office would assist the work of the Economic Community of West African States and the Mano River Union (Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone). It would also carry out good offices roles and special assignments in countries of the subregion on Mr. Annan's behalf, including in conflict prevention and peace-building efforts, as well as report to Headquarters on key developments of subregional significance," the UN news service reported.
WEST AFRICA: Media news from Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone, Togo
In Liberia, two dailies that were closed by the authorities on 20 November were back on the newsstands this week, diplomatic sources in Monrovia told IRIN on Tuesday. According to the government, The News and the Monrovia Guardian had been closed because of tax arrears.
In Sierra Leone, the Independent Media Commission has approved 21 of the country's 60 newspapers, the Sierra Leone Expo Times reported on its website on Monday. It quoted the Commission as saying that the approved periodicals still had to formalise their status with the registrar general and the income tax department.
Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF) said on Monday that it feared a new law increasing the tax payable by private newspapers would cause smaller papers to go under. Parliament recently adopted the law.
In Togo, RSF described the government's suspension on 29 November of two call-in programmes run by a private station, Radio Victoire, as "an attack on press freedom".
And in The Gambia, the International Press Institute (IPI), protested to Gambian President Yahya Jammeh on 28 November against the detention by the national intelligence agency of Alhagie Mbye of the Independent, a local daily. Mbye was arrested on 21 November after claiming in an article that thousands of Senegalese were on the voters' lists for The Gambia's presidential elections, held on 18 October.
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