Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo has met exiled former Liberian leader Charles Taylor to warn him not to interfere in his homeland’s fragile peace process, Nigerian officials said Monday.
”The meeting was held on Saturday at the instance of President Obasanjo and reviewed the situation in Liberia and the need for peace and stability to return,” said presidential spokesperson Remi Oyo.
”The president advised Mr Taylor on the use of his telecommunications facilities, telephones and all that, so that he stays within the confines that govern his asylum in Nigeria,” she said.
Last month the United Nations’s chief respresentative on Liberia, Jacques Klein, said that Taylor — who is living in exile in the southeastern Nigerian city of Calabar — had been telephoning his successor, Moses Blah.
Blah, Taylor’s former vice president, is due to hand over power on Tuesday to an interim administration designed to carry forward Liberia’s peace process, and there have been fears Taylor might try to interfere.
Nigeria had already warned Taylor that any attempt to engage ”in active communications with anyone engaged in political, illegal or governmental activities in Liberia” would be a breach of his asylum conditions.
But on Saturday the Liberian warlord’s spokesperson in exile, Vaanii Paasewe, defended the calls.
”Our calls were not intended to undermine the peace process. We would have expected the incoming president to have wanted some advice, and we also had some ideas,” he said by telephone from Calabar.
Obasanjo has promised to protect Taylor from extradition requests, but if he were to be expelled from Nigeria he could be arrested to face trial at the UN war-crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.
UN prosecutors want to charge Taylor over accusations he sponsored atrocities carried out during the 1990s by rebels in Liberia’s West African neighbour, Sierra Leone. — Sapa-AFP