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UN meeting seeks $488 million to rebuild Liberia
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-02-06 14:59 International aid officials
called on governments and relief groups on Thursday to pledge $488 million to
help rebuild Liberia or risk letting the war-shattered West African nation
slip back into chaos.
Unless a new government in Monrovia is promptly backed up with outside
funding, civil war could again spill over into neighboring countries in an
already unstable region, the officials told a U.N. conference on Liberian
reconstruction.
"After 14 years of conflict in which tens of thousands of people have been
killed, and the continued political, economic and social disorder the country
has endured, there is now the possibility of new hope for the people of
Liberia," said Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the U.N. Development
Program.
"But it is a fragile peace and urgent action is now needed to help ensure
that the gains that have been made toward Liberia's recovery are not reversed,"
Malloch Brown said.
The fighters who recently rioted outside Monrovia because of a shortage of
money for a U.N.-backed disarmament program "were not to be placated with the
line, 'Wait for the donors meeting in New York,"' he said.
Liberia, founded by freed American slaves, has entered a period of relative
stability since a peace deal reached in August, when President Charles Taylor
went into exile, clearing the way for a power-sharing deal with anti-government
rebels.
NEW TRANSITIONAL GOVERNMENT IN POWER
A U.N. peacekeeping force is taking shape and a newly installed transitional
government is in power until October 2005 elections select a new president and
legislature.
The United Nations, the United States and the World Bank are among the
sponsors of the two-day conference that opened on Thursday in hopes of meeting
Liberia's needs over the next two years in such key areas as agriculture,
fisheries, health, education, forestry and telecommunications.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, and the head of the new
provisional government, Gyude Bryant, are among world leaders attending the
meeting.
Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International
Development, said Liberia's years of turmoil had killed as many as 250,000
people, most of them civilians, but had touched all its 3 million people "in
profound ways."
"More than 1.3 million are displaced or refugees. Abductions, tortures, rape
and other human rights atrocities have taken place on a massive scale," he said.
An estimated one in 10 children may have been recruited by militias as
fighters and a similar percentage "has been traumatized by seeing their families
and friends murdered or raped," Natsios said.
Washington has already earmarked $200 million in new money for Liberia, and
the European Union and its 15 member-nations are expected to nearly match
that figure, U.N. officials said.
One major challenge on the agenda is how to rehabilitate the thousands of
armed youth without education or jobs who roam the countryside and neighboring
nations, raping and looting.
"There are instances where young boys have shot their mothers, because their
mothers said, 'Go to school and put the gun down,"' Liberian transition leader
Gyude Bryant told a luncheon at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
"These kids were so high that they shot their mothers' heads off," Bryant
said.
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