Monrovia | Wednesday
UNCONTROLLED logging in Liberia is playing havoc with the country’s rich forest resources and environment and helping President Charles Taylor’s government to stay afloat despite UN sanctions.
Environmentalists in Liberia deplore the phenomenon. Elsewhere, there is growing criticism that timber is helping fuel sub-regional tensions on the borders of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
In its last bi-annual report covering the period from January to June 2000, Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) said export earnings had overshot $20-million, a record.
“The figures given by the report may well be understated because FDA at the moment lacks the capacity to effectively monitor the quantity of logs leaving the country,” a FDA employee said on condition of anonymity.
Several leading environmentalists in the country, including Agriculture Minister Roland Massaquoi, have expressed serious concern.
Massaquoi recently said climate changes over the past two years and the destruction of entire villages by storms and floods were the start of “what we are going to experience as a result of the indiscriminate cutting of logs.”
Award-winning conservationist Alexander Peal echoed him.
“In the past only 4% of trees in concession areas (areas allotted to logging companies) were harvested. Besides, only certain sizes of trees were cut at a given height.
“These fundamental logging principles are now being ignored,” Peal said.
More serious are charges levelled by British non-governmental organisation Global Witness that Liberia’s timber exports were helping offset UN sanctions, imposed for Monrovia’s perceived support to Sierra Leonean rebels.
It called for sanctions on Liberian timber and pointed an accusing finger at France and China.
“The timber provides funds which contribute to perpetuate the armed conflict in the region,” Global Vision director Patrick Alley told AFP recently in London.
According to FDA figures cited by Global Witness, China imported 144,420 cubic metres of wood, constituting 46% of Liberia’s total wood exports between January and June 2000.
France bought 55,006 cubic metres of wood, accounting for 18% of exports, during the same period.
The varieties of wood include the coveted mahogany and local hardwoods.
Other damning charges point to top timber officials and two logging companies, Oriental Timber Company (OTC) and the Royal Timber Corporation (RTC).
Gus Kouwenhoven, chief of RTC, has been cited in an independent report commissioned by the United Nations as being involved “in numerous transactions in the traffic of arms between Liberia and Sierra Leone.”
It said Kouwenhoven was also a top official in the FDA, adding that another FDA member, Lebanese businessman Talal al-Ndine, was implicated in the trade in so-called “blood diamonds” mined by Sierra Leonean rebels.
Both men are supposedly close to Taylor.
Taylor is widely accused of arming Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group in return for the tainted diamonds, a charge he denies. The UN has slapped travel restrictions on top Liberian officials.
Monrovia resident Charles Dorbor said he would not mind sanctions on Liberian timber as he failed to see where the money was going, referring to the country’s moribund economy, devastated by civil war and dogged by mounting inflation and unemployment.
“We don’t see any benefits these logs are bringing. With all the logs that are being exported every day, civil servants have not been paid for seven months,” he said. – AFP
FEATURE:
The tyrant and the logs of war June 1, 2001