UN refugee chief appeals for funds to resettle Liberians

With the deployment of United Nations peacekeeping troops in Liberia gathering speed and easing the way for humanitarian workers to move into the country, UN refugee chief Ruud Lubbers wrapped up a three-nation West Africa tour urging cooperation to help resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees dispossessed by years of war.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, Mr. Lubbers appealed to donors for the $25 million the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) still needs to lay the groundwork for the return of some 150,000 Liberian refugees this year. There are an estimated 350,000 Liberian refugees in neighbouring countries, as well as hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) mostly in and around Monrovia waiting to return to their homes now that a tenuous peace seems to be holding.

Amid increasingly conducive conditions, UNHCR has set 1 October as the target start date for the voluntary repatriation of Liberians from neighbours Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Guinea as well as nearby Mali and Ghana. To date, UNHCR has only received $14 million of the $39.2 million budgeted for its Liberia operations in 2004.

In other news from the region, the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) reported that in a symbolic disarmament ceremony yesterday in Kakata, the Liberian Minister of Defence, Daniel Chea, turned in his personal automatic weapons to the UN sector commander, Brig. Gen. Festus Okonkwo.

The ceremony marked the start of disarmament of ex-Government of Liberia (GoL) militias at Kakata. Along with the Defence Minister's personal AK-47, one shotgun and a sub-machine gun, the ex-GoL artillery unit also turned in two 81-mm mortars, rifles, mortar bombs and ammunitions. Two hundred and fifty-one combatants voluntarily turned in their weapons to UNMIL peacekeepers in an orderly and controlled manner, and were transported for demobilization to the cantonment site at VOA, in Careysburg.

Meanwhile, the head of the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), Daudi Ngelautwa Mwakawago, visited Liberia yesterday for the first time to underline the commitment of and cooperation between the UN peacekeeping missions in the West African sub-region in addressing cross-border issues.

He met with UNMIL chief Jacques Paul Klein and senior UNMIL officials, and visited the disarmament and cantonment sites in Tubmanburg.