Date of publication: August 30, 2006
Source: The Analyst
The United Nations, last Wednesday, vowed to help the government repossess the Sinoe Rubber Plantation.
The repossession of the plantation, which is intended to help Liberia establish security and shore up its economic interests after 14 years of civil war, will bring to two the number of rubber plantations occupied by former fighters.
UN peacekeepers and government security forces recently reclaimed the Guthrie Rubber Plantation in northwest Liberia where about 500 former fighters had lived illegally for three years.
Liberia is home to one of the world's largest rubber plantations, Firestone, and rubber accounts for most of the country's export earnings.
Although the UN Security Council has temporarily lifted sanctions on timber, logging operations have yet to resume. The war destroyed the country's iron ore industry.
Alan Doss, the UN secretary-general's special representative to Liberia, told reporters in the capital Monrovia last week that the UN would not allow anyone to continue to "hold up" Liberia's economic resources.
"We will follow up on the Sinoe Rubber Plantation as we did with Guthrie Plantation," Doss said. The Sinoe plantation is in southeast Liberia.
The UN in May released a report citing widespread abuses by former fighters against civilians in the Guthrie and Sinoe plantations.
"In Sinoe Rubber Plantation, [national police] officers are not present and courts do not operate," the report said.
It noted further, "The ex-LURD [Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy] general and self-proclaimed general manager of Sinoe Rubber Plantation, Mr. Paulson Gartey... is both police and judge on the plantation." Former fighters have made a living illegally tapping the rubber trees and selling the latex sap to merchants in Monrovia.
One former fighter said it was possible to earn about US $150 a week in a country where the World Bank estimates that most ordinary Liberians exist on less than US $1 per day.
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf took office in January, pledging to create jobs and a favorable climate for investment in Liberia.
The civil war ended in August 2003. Some 15,000 UN peacekeepers are in Liberia overseeing the country's post-war transition.