United Nations chief Kofi Annan vowed on Monday that the international community will do everything in its power to ensure the success of presidential elections due in Sierra Leone next year.
”We will spare no effort to ensure that it succeeds,” Annan said during a meeting with UN staff in Freetown.
Sierra Leone holds its first post-civil war elections early next year, although no date has been fixed yet.
Although fighting ended in 2001, President Ahnad Tejan Kabbah officially declared the end of the war in a speech in 2002.
The UN deployed what was then the largest UN peacekeeping operation at the peak of a brutal civil war in Sierra Leone. Its troops pulled out at the end of December last year.
”The election will test the sustainability and reliability of peace, which the UN has built during its six year peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone,” Annan said, according to an official who attended the meeting.
Annan told reporters on Sunday on the fringes of an African Union summit in Gambia that his visit to Freetown and Liberia was part of a UN initiative to help prop up post-conflict transition in the two West African countries.
”Although these countries have emerged from the scourge of war, in partnership with the UN, it is important that we all support them in their transition to peace, stability and prosperity,” he said.
Annan is due to travel to Monrovia later on Monday after talks with the prosecutor at the UN-backed tribunal on Sierra Leone, which is trying nearly 10 suspects, including Liberian former leader Charles Taylor, for war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone’s civil war.
He is also to hold talks with Kabbah.
Annan also reminded the UN staff that the global body ”continues to maintain a zero-tolerance policy” on sexual abuse by UN staff.
”Such conduct undermines the conduct of the UN,” he said. — AFP
