Gunshots were heard until early on Friday as angry youths carrying stones and sticks roamed the streets of the Liberian capital, Monrovia, two days before the scheduled end of a United Nations campaign to disarm fighters from the West African state’s civil war.
A riot, begun late on Thursday in the densely populated red-light district, spread throughout the night across the city. Mosques and churches were burned and countless houses were looted and torched, chief police Inspector Chris Massaquoi said.
”We are not in a position to take a count of the casualties,” he said.
Roads throughout the capital were jammed with people, who closed the junction that leads through Paynesville to the national police academy. In the downtown Broad Street area, hundreds of young people were seen running in the same direction, grabbing sticks and other projectiles from the filthy streets of the capital.
Massaquoi said there were several possible causes for the riot, the latest popular uprising in the war-torn capital teeming with former fighters from the back-to-back civil wars that raged here since 1989.
”Initially there was an ethnic angle to the unrest, but we are not able to make an accurate judgement,” he said. ”We are not pointing fingers but there are lots of ex-combatants with arms who have not yet disarmed, so we cannot rule them out.”
The UN campaign to disarm fighters from Liberia’s second civil war, which was declared over in August last year, is to wrap up on Sunday, having registered about 85 000 people associated with the three warring factions.
Many of the former fighters have complained that they have yet to receive the benefits they were promised under the programme and have threatened reprisals should the UN mission in Liberia fail to deliver.
The failure of the disarmament programme following Liberia’s first civil war, which ended in 1997 with the election of former president Charles Taylor, is considered one of the root causes of the second rebellion that erupted in 1999.
Massaquoi said the Liberian national police was deployed around the capital, backing up the international military and police forces on the ground as part of the UN peacekeeping operation.
”Whatever it takes in coordination with the UN military we will do; we might have to use force,” he said.
”We will not compromise the lives of Liberians, or the peace we have been working for.” — Sapa-AFP