No evidence of politically motivated armed groups in Liberia, according to UN report

I have been slowly making my way through the June 2008 UN Panel of Experts on Liberia report. I don’t know how to attach the report to this posting, but send me an email if you want a copy and I can forward it to you. Be warned, it’s a big PDF file.

Here are some excerpts from the report that I found most interesting:

The existence of the Security Council travel ban against certain Liberians and foreign nationals is widely acknowledged and is subject to some criticism among Liberians. Nonetheless, the names on the current list are not so widely known. There are resource, administrative and technical challenges to the enforcement of the travel ban, including out-of-date and missing information (such as valid passport numbers). The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization is not officially provided with updated versions of the travel ban list. The Panel visited Roberts International Airport to scrutinize passenger ledgers for the period from 1 September 2007 to 5 May 2008 and found no evidence of violations of the travel ban.

The 1986 Constitution of Liberia is cited as the reason Liberia has not frozen any assets as required by Security Council resolution 1532 (2004). However, it is the opinion of several high-ranking legislators and legal scholars in Liberia, as well as several technical legal advisers, that Liberian laws do provide for such action…

There were no significant incidents relating to the violation of the Security Council embargo against exports of arms to Liberia. However, a series of smallscale violations of the arms embargo took place during the Panel’s mandate, most of which involved residents of Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea transporting ammunition and single-barrel rifles across the border into Liberia either for personal use (hunting) or commercial gain. The reason for this is that the “total ban on firearms” (Executive Order No. 6) has led to a scarcity of single-barrel rifles and related ammunition in Liberia.

The Panel found no evidence of the existence of politically motivated armed groups or evidence of recruitment efforts in Liberia. In Bomi, Bong, Gbarpolu, Grand Bassa, Margibi, Maryland, River Cess and Sinoe Counties, ex-combatants have organized themselves into income-generating groups that engage in, among other activities, farming, transport (motorcycle taxis), pit-sawing, scrap-metal trading and rubber tapping. In some cases, former-combatant command structures exist, as with the Sinoe Rubber Plantation in Sinoe County.