Liberia probes reports of fighters training
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MONROVIA, Liberia (Reuters) -- A Liberian government team is due in the northeast of the country this week to investigate reports that hundreds of fighters loyal to exiled president Charles Taylor are undergoing training there.
A senior government official said the gunmen, mostly from Liberia and Guinea, were at a camp in Nimba County, the region near Ivory Coast from where Taylor launched a rebellion in 1989 that triggered nearly 14 years of war.
The allegations highlight the fragile stability of a region where three states are emerging from civil wars and young fighters cross porous borders seeking work as guns for hire.
"I can tell you that there is military training taking place in Nimba, near the border with Ivory Coast," Deputy Interior Minister for Administration, Jerry Gonyon, told Reuters.
He said he believed the aim was to destabilise Liberia and neighbouring Guinea. Taylor blames Guinea for backing the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) that battled to the capital last year and forced him into exile.
The commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Liberia, Lieutenant-General Daniel Opande, told reporters he was concerned about the allegations but added that investigations by his force had so far found no evidence of any secret military training going on in Nimba.
Opande said U.N. peacekeepers -- who are present in two towns in Nimba County but have yet to deploy to the remotest corners of the densely forested region -- wanted to be part of the government investigating team.
A member of the team, which had initially been due to travel to Nimba on Wednesday, said the trip had been postponed to Thursday or Friday for logistical reasons. He said the team would consider the U.N. request.
In the past, Gonyon's warnings have proved true.
He told then-president Samuel Doe in 1989 that Taylor was planning a war in Liberia. Taylor, who now lives in exile in Nigeria and is seen as the mastermind behind a web of conflicts in West Africa, launched his campaign to topple Doe shortly afterwards, helped by a strong support base in Nimba.
However Harrison Kanwea, Nimba County's police chief, disputed Gonyon's latest allegation.
"There is no training in that place...The people of this county (Nimba) have suffered too long and there is no need to support another war," he told Reuters.
Taylor's departure from Liberia last August cleared the way for a power-sharing deal between his government and rebels. Some 11,000 United Nations peacekeepers are now in the country.
Guinea has long been seen as a bulwark of stability against its neighbours, but the health of its diabetic, chain smoking leader is deteriorating and U.N. officials have warned that mounting tension there could destabilise the region.
The United Nations has peacekeepers in Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone, but no presence in Guinea.
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