A UN food agency warned on Friday that hundreds of thousands of people in Liberia are cut off from aid and risked starvation unless a peaceful solution to the country’s civil war is reached quickly.
The Rome-based UN World Food Programme said the more than 100 000 who have poured into camps outside the capital of Monrovia cannot be reached because of the fighting.
”Our trucks are loaded and ready to go but we have no guarantees of security,” Arnold Vercken, the agency’s deputy director for West Africa, said in a press release.
”These people are in a no-man’s-land. We just can’t reach them,” he said.
The country is locked in a three-year war between forces loyal to President Charles Taylor and rebels seeking to oust him.
The World Food Programme said tens of thousands of people have taken refuge in Monrovia’s churches, schools, mosques and abandoned warehouses while thousands more have fled to neighboring countries. – Sapa-AP