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Catch 22
Difficult cooperation with
fragile states
05/2006
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[ Liberia ]
Catch 22
After 16 years of civil war, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s inauguration was a sign of Liberia’s peace process succeeding in January.
Yet the new state is faced with a dilemma. The government does not have the money to pay security forces, but it
cannot hope to control vital sources of revenue – timber and diamonds – without police or military. For a long time yet,
the international community will have to remain active in this country.
[ By Uwe Kerkow ]
“We can train up to 650 people simultaneously here”, says Christian Mainzinger, a German police officer, pointing to several white UN tents, which are being used to accommodate or teach recruits on the outskirts of Monrovia, the Liberian capital. There is also a canteen tent, as well as two large tents for events and physical excersise in the rainy season. Mainzinger is coordinating the training of Liberia’s new police force on behalf of the United Nations.
The force will include uniformed officers on patrol, a crime investigation department, a water police and an airport division. An immigration authority will also be set up, along with a department of corrections and a “special security service” – which will be put in charge of protecting property and, most importantly, people. By summer this year, a total of 3,500 police officers should be fully trained and on duty, of which nearly half were already in service during the elections last October.
“We will not be rebuilding the Liberian police force along the lines of the USA’s Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Mainzinger says. “The police should be responsible for law enforcement at a regional, not a federal level. A special drug unit would also be superfluous.” Previously, police forces in Liberia were organised according to the US model. However, the new force will adhere to UN standards. Thus, the police in Liberia, like their British counterparts, will mostly be unarmed. Mainzinger praises the emphasis that UN training specifications place on constitutional principles and human rights. The top graduates are taught to serve as trainers, and will, in turn, instruct new recruits. “This is how the force will acquire trainers and, later, qualified managers,” Mainziger says.
Each member of the police force will receive a basic monthly salary of $ 90. However, the interim government was already two months behind with salary payments last autumn, according to Mainzinger. Moreover, training the new security forces is not cheap, either. According to Mainzinger, $ 2.6 million has already been spent, and he estimates that virtually the same amount will to be needed again to complete the project. Rebuilding Liberia’s police academy as desired would cost an additional four to five million dollars.
While overhauling the police force and the judicial system is on schedule, restructuring the army has been beset by delays. Work only started at the beginning of this year. One reason for hold-ups was that the donors were late in making funds available to pay off demobilised soldiers. While former members of the police are, in principle, eligible for a position with the new force, the old Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) is being almost completely demobilised. The authorities have been working on verifying all claims made by former soldiers – a long process, which, in some cases, went along with militant protests from those affected.
“Altogether, some 4,000 regular AFL soldiers will be demobilised or retired. Depending on their rank, they will receive between $ 2,000 and $ 5,000 in severance pay,” says Fred Serene, programme manager of DynCorp International, the US-based security company contracted by the US administration to wind up the old army and establish a new military force. This task will be more costly than expected because, according to Serene, there were more captains than common soldiers in the AFL. Furthermore, the 9,400 men recruited during the war will be paid off, each receiving $ 540 in compensation. Funds for this programme come mainly from the USA, but also in part from the EU and South Africa. “We have been in Liberia since May last year and will probably stay here for another two years,” Serene estimates.
Indispensable forces
The new army will initially consist of only some 2,000 men and women, and will again be known as the “Armed Forces of Liberia”. As before, the basic pay will be $ 90 a month, increasing by $ 20 for each military rank. DynCorp could train three times as many soldiers, according Serene, if that was what the new government of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf wanted. But it was the donors, not the Liberian government, who decided on the strength of the AFL. Essentially, the Liberian state still exists only on paper. Almost 90 % of its budget stems from development assistance, refugee aid and emergency relief. But security also costs money – even if there are less than 10,000 police officers, soldiers and security force personnel to be paid.
Nonetheless, everything depends on these men and women. The new state’s ability to function rests on whether the new president will run a stable coalition government encompassing all of the country’s main interest groups – including, if possible, her election opponent, Georges Manneh Weah. On the other hand, the parliament and the senate must also be kept under control. A range of people, whose incentive to stand for public office was to ensure personal immunity from war crimes charges, have been elected into both houses. Probably the single most important task for Johnson-Sirleaf is to prevent such interest groups from entangling the security forces in their networks of patronage. In the late 1980s, the army had degenerated into “Doe soldiers“ and “Taylor boys” – militias of the main opponents in the civil war at the time. To make sure something like that does not happen again, soldiers must be paid regularly.
In order to acquire the state revenue needed to do so, Liberia’s dormant economy will have to be revived. However, this is exactly where the country is stuck in a catch-22 situation. Liberia’s economy has always depended on the export of rubber, timber and diamonds. International sanctions are still in place against Liberian diamonds and tropical timber, and will only be lifted once the new government can show that it is in control of extraction of – and trade in – these commodities.
Without full-fledged security forces, however, it will be impossible to implement the required certification system. On the one hand, the government must monitor the extraction of diamonds and timber for international trade, in order to credibly certify their origin. It must ensure that no unlicensed companies mine for diamonds or log timber. In the past, awarding such licences was the major source of revenue for the Liberian state. On the other hand, the government must combat the smuggling in diamonds and tropical timber. For both tasks it will need security forces. In short, there can be no trade in timber and diamonds without a police force and an army, but without the income from timber and diamond exports, there will be no funds to pay the security forces.
The fact that there are offshore oil deposits along Liberia’s coast and willing Liberian investors in the USA, will not solve the problem. The kidnappings that regularly occur in Nigeria show the extent to which oil companies (and their employees) are vulnerable to lapses in security. Expatriate Liberians from the USA, who plan to start small or medium-sized companies, need a minimum level of security, if their confidence in their former homeland is to be restored. Many migrated because of the civil war.
“Liberia has a real chance of being a success story for Africa in 2006,” said Dennis McNamara, head of the UN’s Internal Displacement Division, in late February. But if this potential is to be achieved, then the donors must invest several hundred million dollars during the course of this first crucial year after the elections. McNamara believes that, if efforts to stabilise Liberia succeed, the country could become the centre of a regional stabilisation process.
Therefore, not only is financial aid needed, but the peacekeeping mandate of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) should also be extended for as long as possible. Present plans are for the UN blue helmets to move out at the end of next year, or in 2008 at the latest. A premature withdrawal could, however, prove fatal and plunge the country back into anarchy. Security throughout the entire region continues to be fragile. UN troops were withdrawn from neighbouring Sierra Leone at the end of 2005; the situation in the Côte d’Ivoire is extremely tense; and Charles Taylor, though in jail, is still very rich and may yet stir up trouble. “If we don’t stabilise Liberia, the instability factor is bound to spread,” warns UN-representative McNamara.
Uwe Kerkow
is a freelance journalist living in Königswinter near Bonn.
uwe.kerkow@t-online.de
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