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Liberia & Sierra Leone: Rebuilding Failed States

International Crisis Group (Brussels)
PRESS RELEASE
December 8, 2004
Posted to the web December 8, 2004
Dakar/Brussels
The international interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone are failing to
produce stable sovereign states. A fresh strategy is needed if both are not to
remain vulnerable to new fighting and state collapse.
Liberia_&_Sierra_Leone:_Rebuilding_Failed_States, the latest report from
the International Crisis Group, says peacebuilding in both countries is off
track because it is treated as a straightforward matter of implementing a
checklist of operational processes and does not tackle underlying political
dynamics. Deeper -- and much longer -- engagement is required.
"The international community needs to make fifteen- to 25-year commitments to
security and civil freedoms in Liberia and Sierra Leone", says Suliman Baldo,
Crisis Group's Africa Program Director. "It needs to invest the time to allow
new political forces to develop".
A year after the inauguration of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), the
situation is improved, but peace is fragile. Monrovia has no power grid, no
sewage or water systems, and no land line telephones. Crime is a major problem,
and outside major towns and principal roads, UNMIL exercises little control.
Civilians are still subject to abuses by ex-combatants, who continue illegal
extraction of gold, rubber and timber.
Sierra Leone, culturally, historically and geographically linked, has already
had its elections, but the UN mission (UNAMSIL) that was scheduled to withdraw
all peacekeepers by December 2004 will remain until at least the end of June
2005 for fear peace would not otherwise hold.
In both cases the operational checklist includes deployment of peacekeepers;
disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of fighters; repatriation of
refugees; judicial and security sector reform; and elections, as virtually the
final step. Those are all necessary measures but more is needed, and the time
frame of two to five years is unrealistically short.
A more radical strategy is required in both countries. After restoring
security, the international community should more quickly give greater
political responsibility, while simultaneously targeting its interventions to
help build non-political and professional law enforcement and judicial
institutions to establish the rule of law, protect civil rights and foster a
public space within which citizens can hammer out their own solutions. In
Liberia, where it is still possible, the international community should adopt a
long-term revenue-collection trusteeship or management system that would
simultaneously finance much of its engagement, take incentives away from
spoilers and give the state significantly more money.
"These approaches can only succeed within a much longer time frame", says Mike
McGovern Crisis Group's West Africa Project Director. "Liberia and Sierra Leone
took decades to decay, and it will take decades to restore sustainable security
and political and economic structures".
The new Peacebuilding Commission proposed by the UN High-level Panel on 2
December 2004 could be the institutional vehicle to implement such long-term
commitments.

   

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