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IRIN-WA Update 540 of events in West Africa (Tuesday
31 August)
SIERRA LEONE: HRW calls on RUF to release its prisoners
Human Rights Watch has called on the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) to free all prisoners of war and abducted children, which the former rebel group promised to do in a peace agreement it signed on 7 July with Sierra Leone's government.
The New York-based non-governmental body said in a 30 August statement that, despite this undertaking, the RUF had only freed some of the children they had taken from their homes.
When the RUF invaded eastern Freetown in January, HRW said, at least 3,000 children were reported missing. HRW said some 650 children have been "unofficially released" or managed to escape. These and 345 others who were released officially, it said, all came from areas under rebel control in the western and northern parts of the country.
HRW said it asked the RUF in a letter "why there have been no releases from the eastern rebel strongholds of Kono, Magburaka and Kailahun".
HRW expressed hope that the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, would put pressure on the RUF leaders to honour their peace commitments.
Otunnu discusses war-affected children
Otunnu, who arrived in Freetown on Monday, has met President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, and officials of all ministries, ECOMOG, national NGOs and humanitarian agencies to discuss issues related to war-affected children, humanitarian sources told IRIN on Tuesday.
He has visited projects for street children, an amputee rehabilitation centre and a family home care centre for former child soldiers in the Freetown area. The sources said he would go to the inland towns of Bo and Kenema on Wednesday to tour a camp for internally displaced people and visit a training programme for children.
He is due to meet Kamajor (pro-government militia) leaders in Bo, some 175 km southeast of Freetown, to talk about the recruitment of child soldiers before travelling to Kenema, 70 km east of Bo, to inspect a therapeutic feeding centre.
He will later visit a camp for Sierra Leonean refugees in the border town of Guekedou in Guinea.
Ex-SLA hold RUF commanders
Ex-members of the former Sierra Leone Army (ex-SLA) were still holding two Revolutionary United Front (RUF) commanders, Mike Lamin and Denis Mingo, on Tuesday, ECOMOG spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Olukolade told IRIN.
The two men had gone to the Occra Hills, about 50 km east of the capital, for an RUF military congress, according to humanitarian sources in Freetown. UNOMSIL officers and some members of the ECOWAS Peace Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) who had accompanied them were detained briefly and released, the sources said.
Olukolade said the two were held because of a division between the RUF and the ex-SLA -- soldiers loyal to the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) that overthrew President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah in May 1997.
The two groups became allies when the AFRC invited the RUF to join it in Freetown following the 1997 coup. After ECOMOG troops drove the AFRC out of Freetown in February 1998, the RUF/ex-SLA took to the bush, where they remained until July's peace pact.
However, tension has been high between the two allies because of claims by ex-SLA that they were left out of the peace agreement.
LIBERIA: Why Lofa?
Many theories have been advanced to explain why Lofa
appears more prone to armed conflict than other parts
of Liberia.
Analysts say, for example, that the large amount of relief assets concentrated in upper Lofa for Sierra Leonean refugees there provides an attractive target for potential insurgents. Then again, the region borders on Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Other factors cited include the fact that more people from Lofa enlist in the armed forces than residents of other regions and the economic disparity between Mandingoes, many of whom are merchants, and other ethnic groups.
The undermining of civilian authorities by the various security units operating in Lofa, the proliferation of arms and drug abuse by ex-combatants are also some of the key problems, non-governmental sources say.
[See separate Item: irin-english-1514, titled 'Background Report on Lofa County]
Mulbah promises to clean up police
A vow by the new police chief, Paul Mulbah, to stamp out crime and tighten gun control within his department has been welcomed cautiously by human rights groups and other civil-society bodies in Liberia.
"The development has been well received, especially since he has been able to admit publicly what most people knew: that armed robbery is carried out by elements within the police," one Liberian political observer told IRIN.
After taking measures to censure criminals within the police, the source said, Mulbah will need to make a comprehensive review of all police files to weed those with criminal pasts.
Civil liberty bodies say 60-70 percent of the members of a special police unit created since the end of the civil war are criminals or former faction fighters and that they have been committing crimes and abusing people's rights with impunity.
The pre-war regular police, one source said, have been restricted to traffic duties.
The national director for the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission (CJPC), Steve Wilson, said he expected Mulbah, whom he was scheduled to meet on Wednesday, to make commitments to ensure that the police end their culture of brutality and impunity.
"He should try to turn the tables so the public can begin to have some confidence in the police to protect their lives and property," Wilson told IRIN.
He said the CJPC, a local human rights and legal aid body, would want Mulbah to introduce human rights training into the police academy.
In a measure to gain public confidence, Mulbah told reporters on Monday he had ordered the immediate arrest of any armed off-duty policeman found in the streets of the capital after midnight, Reuters reported.
He also said any unlicensed cars on the streets would be impounded irrespective of the driver's station in life. "I mean this and it will happen," Reuters reported him as saying.
Residents have said that unmarked vehicles seen in Monrovia belonged to senior government officials, according to Reuters.
Mulbah also said that two policemen were among five people arrested following a robbery in Monrovia at the weekend.
Liberian President Charles Taylor appointed Mulbah last week to replace Joe Tate, who died on 10 August in a plane crash. Mulbah has no experience in police affairs, sources said, having served as an administrator for most of his professional career.
BENIN: Tutsi detainees flown in from the DRC
Some 180 ethnic Tutsis held under "protective custody" in Kinshasa for the past year were on Monday flown to Cotonou, Benin, as part of an operation arranged by the US government and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an OCHA official in Kinshasa told IRIN on Tuesday.
The Tutsis will remain in Benin for "a month or two" during which they will be assisted by UNHCR and will undergo US immigration formalities. "After that, they will be flown to the US," the official said. Another 180 detained Tutsis are scheduled to be flown from Kinshasa to Benin in the next few days, he said.
The Office of the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the DRC assisted in planning the relocation operation by serving as an "intermediary" between IOM and the government, the latest OCHA monthly situation report said.
It said a number of persons of Tutsi origin who had remained in hiding since August 1998 had been encouraged by recent developments to come out of concealment. Some had started to arrive at "protective custody centres" in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, where about 1,500 Congolese Tutsis were currently registered, the report added.
NIGERIA: Fifteen reported killed in boat disaster
About 15 people are said to have died when a boat capsized
off Victoria Island, Lagos, on Monday, news organisations
reported.
'The Guardian' newspaper in Lagos quoted a survivor
as saying that the accident happened after the boat's
engine stalled. The vessel, laden with food and about
22 passengers, then drifted and smashed against a pillar
under a bridge.
Nigeria has been plagued by boat mishaps in recent months.
On 21 August, about 30 persons died after their boat capsized in the Matan Marfa river in north-western Nigeria, according to news reports. About five months ago, scores of people died in a ferry disaster near the south-eastern town of Port Harcourt.
NIGER: Twenty-nine prisoners die by suffocation, news reports say
Twenty-nine prisoners suffocated to death in a cell into which they were forced by guards after a riot at the main prison in Niger's capital, Niamey, news organisations reported on Tuesday.
They were among some 50 inmates whom guards had forced into the windowless cell after they protested against their conditions of detention, Reuters reported. It quoted a prison official as saying that they died from lack of air.
AFP reported that the deaths occurred on Thursday and were reported on Monday by a private radio station.
Abidjan, 30 August 1999; 19:05 GMT
[ENDS]
[IRIN-WA: Tel: +225 217366 Fax: +225 216335 e-mail: irin-wa@ocha.unon.org ]
Item: irin-english-1519
[This item is delivered in the "irin-english" service of the UN's IRIN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. For further information or free subscriptions, or to change your keywords, contact e-mail: irin@ocha.unon.org or fax: +254 2 622129 or Web: http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN . If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer.]
Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 1999
Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar
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