Liberia: Ivorian Crisis Worries Sirleaf

New Democrat (Monrovia)

23 March 2011

As the crisis in Cote d’Ivoire reaches melting point, a worried President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf says the dangers for Liberia are evident.

“We’re already at war. We hope there will not be an escalation of war,” she told Reuters in Monrovia.

“There has been a lot of investment for peace in this sub-region — we’re beginning to see the result of the investment… If nothing is done to resolve the crisis, all of these efforts will be undermined,” she warned in the interview.

“The UN has put out an appeal but the response has been very slow and inadequate,” Johnson-Sirleaf said.

Around 400 Ivorians have died and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in a dispute over a November 28 presidential vote which U.N.-certified results showed was won by Alassane Ouattara, a rival to incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo.

Liberia is still recovering from years of civil war between 1998 and 2003, and is struggling to cope with some 90,000 Ivorian refugees who have poured across the border since the dispute over the November presidential vote turned violent.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) appealed for $55 million in aid in mid-January but with the focus of world attention on the conflict in Libya and the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, said earlier this month that barely $5 million had come.

UNMIL boss, Ellen Margaret Løj, has issued similar warnings, saying the security situation in Liberia, as a result of the Ivorian crisis and the scheduled elections, is now “complex.”

Gbagbo, who has the backing of the army, says the results were rigged and has refused to quit, pointing to a decision by the country’s Constitutional Council to reverse Ouattara’s win, a council headed by a long-standing Gbagbo ally.

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