HEADQUARTERS PRESS CONFERENCE ON LIBERIA SANCTIONS

Sanctions on Liberia were working to a limited extent, according to Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore, Chairman of the Sanctions Committee on Liberia, who briefed correspondents at Headquarters this morning on the report of the Panel of Experts studying those sanctions.  The press conference took place immediately prior to an open debate on the subject in the Security Council.

“There is good news and bad news on that front”, Mr. Mahbubani said.  The main purpose of the sanctions, he explained, was to persuade the Liberian Government to cut off its support for the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone and so facilitate a peace settlement in that country.  Positive developments in that regard included diplomatic initiatives among the Mano River Union countries.  However, there was evidence that the Liberian Government continued to violate the sanctions regime.

Joining Mr. Mahbubani at the press conference were Martin Chungong Ayafor of Cameroon, Chairman of the Panel of Experts on Liberia; Atabou Bodian, of Senegal, an expert from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO); John Peleman of Belgium, an expert on arms and transportation; Harjit Singh Sandhu of India, an expert from Interpol; and Alex Vines of the United Kingdom, an expert on diamonds. 

Manuel Bessler and Rosa Malango, Humanitarian Affairs Officers of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), were also present to introduce a report on the humanitarian effects of the sanctions.  Mr. Bessler would also be speaking in the Council about that report.  It was the first time, he said, that the Council had asked for such an assessment before imposing further sanctions.

Mr. Mahbubani said that it was important to take the Panel of Experts' report seriously; it was comprehensive and represented a tremendous expenditure of effort and resources.  Leaks of the report had focused only on the shipping registry.  However, there were recommendations on a wide range of topics: transport, weapons, the Liberian Government’s use of revenue, logging and wood processing, diamonds, the travel ban and, of course, the continuing monitoring of Council resolution 1343.  The report had already been discussed by the Sanctions Committee in both formal and informal meetings.  Beside this morning’s discussion in the Security Council, there would be a mandated second review of the sanctions in Liberia on Wednesday.

Mr. Peleman said the report examined, in detail, how Liberia bought and financed its weapons.  It named companies, individuals and networks involved and made some specific recommendations, for example advocating the grounding of a particular company’s airplanes.  Some countries were seen as passively involved, unaware that their airspace was being used.  International organizations would have to deal with various actors, but it was up to individual States to deal with problems under their own sovereignty.

In response to questions about alleged links between sanctions-busting pipelines and the Al-Qaeda terrorist group, Mr. Sandhu said that the financiers of terrorism employed every possible means of moving money without using banking channels -- and that prominently included diamonds.  The name of Ibrahim Bah, who had old ties to Libya and various Islamic terrorist groups in that regard, had come up in connection with weapons shipments from Burkina Faso through Liberia to the RUF.  Subsequent investigations could try to establish a specific link between those activities and Al-Qaeda, but the subject had not been within the Panel’s mandate thus far.

Links between sanctions-busting and Hezbollah, as reported in the Washington Post, were also not specifically established by the report.  Mr. Peleman said that the interconnections in that area were complex.  Factions in the Lebanese civil war had been financed through banking systems in West Africa.  There was also much Lebanese participation in the diamond trade.  In addition, there were extended Mideast families that had offices in Antwerp and throughout the diamond regions of Africa and who, it was alleged, had links to radical organizations in the Middle East.

Mr. Ayafor said the Panel made recommendations for another investigative mission to the area; if terrorist groups were seen as relevant to the conflict in the region, they would be included.  Mr. Mahbubani added that right now it was up to the Council to decide in what areas there would be follow-up.  As far as he knew, the issue of Al-Qaeda possibly being financed through diamonds had not been discussed yet in the Council.

In response to a question about the connections between the timber industry and sanctions-busting, Mr. Peleman said that any industry involving international investment could wind up funding arms.  In the case of timber, bank documents showed payments to arms suppliers from a company that held timber concessions.  Helicopters had been imported both for use by the timber company and the Liberian security apparatus.  Various individuals, named in the report, were also involved in both timber and arms shipments.

A correspondent noted an apparent contradiction between the report of the Panel of Experts and the report on the humanitarian effects of the sanctions, the latter saying further sanctions would be harmful the Panel recommending more. 

Mr. Mahbubani replied that it was not necessarily a contradiction.  The sanctions on Liberia were supposed to be “smart sanctions”, that is, sharply targeted.  They were designed not to affect the population.

However, he continued, President Charles Taylor had won the propaganda battle for Liberian public opinion, blaming the sanctions for a host of travails.  And, indeed, the OCHA report showed that humanitarian aid to Liberia, which was not supposed to be affected, had plummeted.  The OCHA report refocused attention on those humanitarian problems.  “We do not want the Liberian sanctions regime to end up like the Iraqi sanctions regime, where the perception is that it is hurting the people and not hurting those against whom it is intended”, he said.

* *** *