PRESS BRIEFING ON SECURITY COUNCIL WEST AFRICA MISSION

Briefing correspondents on the eve of the Security Council’s mission to seven West African countries, the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative, Jeremy Greenstock, who will lead the mission, told correspondents that it would focus on three principal issues, namely, the situations in Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia.

Welcoming correspondents to a “second bite” at a press conference on the Council’s West Africa mission, which was to have left in late May, he said the Council’s decision to delay the mission had been based on the realization at the time that it would have coincided with the lead-up to the adoption of resolution 1483 on Iraq.  As there was business to do all the time in a region such as West Africa, he believed the change of date would not affect the mission’s usefulness.  What the mission had to do was valuable and necessary.  The mission would demonstrate that the Security Council was paying close attention to the regions of Africa that badly needed international attention.

The eight-day mission, which will leave this evening and return on 5 July, will also visit Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.  In executing the mission, he said he was pleased to be working closely with regional governments and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), particularly on Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, and with the Economic and Social Council on the issue of Guinea-Bissau.

The mission would begin in Guinea-Bissau, which, he said, was more a question of peace-building, or “trying to get a sensitive and fragile internal situation going better”.

In Côte d’Ivoire, he continued, the mission would follow on the heels of work within the region to implement the Linas-Marcoussis Agreement.  The Agreement was a good agreement that must be built upon between the protagonists in the recent civil strife, particularly in the North and West of Côte d’Ivoire, following a long period of political breakdown between different factions.  A properly elected Government that had committed to the Agreement was in place.  The mission wanted to talk with the Government, the other factions and the leadership of the armed forces to ensure that the Agreement was followed, both in spirit and letter, and that the people of Côte d’Ivoire were given priority in decisions on political and security issues in the next few months.

There was a strong recognition within the Council that France had played a positive role in Côte d’Ivoire in helping to engage the parties in a cessation of hostilities and in the ceasefire that had lead to the Agreement, he added.  France was continuing to play an important peacekeeping and peace observation role.  As a member of the collective mission on the Security Council, France was not playing a separate role from the rest of the mission.  The presence of French peacekeeping forces on the ground, however, was important until other arrangements could be made.

“In Liberia, we obviously have a moving situation -- a pretty distressing situation”, he said.  There was an agreement to observe an ECOWAS-negotiated cessation of hostilities and ceasefire, which was to have led to discussions on a political agreement to replace the current political arrangement with a more broadly based transitional government.  “That work still needs to be done”, he said. 

The ECOWAS, which was in the lead, was supported by a contact group of interested international players, including some European States and the United States, he said.  The contact group was supporting the ECOWAS negotiation.  The Security Council wanted to lend its own support to the negotiation.  In that respect, it would try to use its weight to persuade all the factions to agree on what the next political arrangements should be.

“It’s been very public that a strong candidate for one of those arrangements should be an end to the current Government led by President Charles Taylor, who has, at least at times, offered to give up his presidency for the sake of the wider benefit of the Liberian people”, he said.  The negotiations needed to continue and the ceasefire needed to hold.  He was sure that the Security Council members would sympathize with the Secretary-General’s statement today on the ongoing violence around Monrovia, which could only cause further distress to the people living or trapped there.  He was also sure that the Council would also share the Secretary-General’s condemnation of the apparent attempt to use armed violence to solve political questions.

The Security Council could not send a mission to a country where armed conflict was taking place without putting a tremendous strain on security organizations, he said.  The mission would, therefore, follow security advice in deciding whether or not to go to Liberia.  If the mission were unable to fly to Monrovia, it would use that time, with the permission of Ghana’s Government, to return to Accra to talk to members of the factions relevant to a peace agreement, as well as to representatives of civil society and humanitarian organizations, either in Accra or Abidjan.  If the mission were unable to go to Monrovia for security reasons, it would not lessen its attention to the conflict.

The mission would also visit Guinea and Sierra Leone, the other two of the three countries of the Mano River Union, to seek their views on current events, he said.  The mission would also study the state of rebuilding process in Sierra Leone and see whether the Rabat agreement arrangements for good practice among the countries of the Mano River Union could be taken further.

After Guinea-Bissau, the mission would travel on Sunday, 29 June, to Abuja to meet with Nigerian President Obasanjo, who was a major regional player with close interest in subjects under discussion, he said.  In Accra, Ghana, the mission would meet with President Kufuor, who currently held the rotating ECOWAS chairmanship, on the organization’s input into the mission’s three main issues.

He said he would join the mission on Sunday morning in Lagos, before flying to Abuja.  Throughout the mission, they would look not only at political issues and regional political structures, but also at humanitarian issues.  The region was in a condition of real distress and ordinary people were suffering miserably.  The mission had talked in detail with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and with non-governmental and civil society representatives in New York, about their views on Africa.  Members of the mission would take with them a number of recommendations for action on humanitarian issues, including the protection of civilians, children recruited for armed conflict and violence against women and children as a tool of war.

The Security Council last went as a mission to the region in October 2000, he said.  He had also led that mission, which had centred on Sierra Leone.  At that time, he had promised to return to the region before leaving New York for a further mission.  He was pleased to lead the mission, within a month of his departure from New York, to fulfil that promise.

Could the Security Council take anything Charles Taylor said seriously, and, given the breakdown of the ceasefire, could it consider an emergency, armed mission to forestall a mass killing in Monrovia? a correspondent asked.

There was no doubt, he responded, that any political pressure on the protagonists in the Liberia conflict, not least Charles Taylor, to compromise and produce a government that would work for the Liberian people depended on pressures exerted by regional leaders.  The region needed to own the politics of the Liberia tragedy.  The mission was there in a supportive capacity.  The Council could generate weight behind the action of political players in the region.  The ECOWAS had moved swiftly to instrument the Abu Bakar mediation process.  The Council could find ways of exerting extra pressures, and he hoped those pressures, in due course, tell, particularly on President Taylor, who, the Security Council believed, had not served the interest of the Liberian people.  The Council was not contemplating the use of force from outside the region to remove him.  While there had been an indictment, the Security Council was not there to do the work of the court.  In Freetown, Sierra Leone, the mission would visit the Special Court to show its support.

As far as any other interventions were concerned, the Security Council was well aware of the added value brought to the Sierra Leone situation by decisions by the United Kingdom’s Government, as well as the added value brought to the Côte d’Ivoire situation by the French Government, he added.  If a leading nation were prepared to take a role in Liberia, it would be broadly welcomed.  They were not there yet, however.

Asked why he was delaying his trip until Sunday, he said he had unbreakable commitments in New York, which meant he could not leave before Saturday morning.  Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser of Mexico had agreed to lead the mission for its Guinea Bissau leg.

Asked whether there was a possibility that the United States would take a leading role in Liberia, he said the United States would have to answer that question.  Everyone would think that the United States would be the natural candidate for such an operation.  He understood that there was some discussion in Washington about the pros and cons of such action.  He respected the United States’ wish to take more time on that decision.

Asked whether the timing of the indictment of President Taylor complicated the political process to find a peace agreement in Liberia, he said it was up to the court to take its own decisions on its own timing.  There had been strong rumours of a sealed indictment before the prosecutor had made a public announcement of an indictment against President Taylor.  There was not such a huge difference between the “Damocles” in the sealed indictment and the “Damocles” in a public indictment.  It had not made much difference to the overall turn of events, which had rested on the evolution of the civil war itself and on the political pressures brought to bear by regional leaders.

He said he had not put a final question to the other mission members on whether they wished to go to Monrovia, if security situation permitted it.  He had asked them to be prepared to answer that question and to discuss with their governments whether they had any inhibitions about seeing particular leaders if they went into Monrovia.  He had not yet received his own instructions on that question.

When asked what he would wish to tell Charles Taylor, he said that it was time for a change.  President Taylor would have to make his own decision on what part he wished to play in that change.  The failure of the Government to run a stable Liberia and President Taylor’s failure to respond to the indictment were factors that had to be taken into account.  It was time for change and time to put the Liberian people first.  The purposes of ECOWAS mediation to form a coalition government -– which might contain members of President Taylor’s current Government -- over the next few months was a sensible way to go forward if the Liberian people were to be put first, rather than the political ambitions of one faction or another.

In response to a question on the Special Court’s request that the Council use its authority, under Chapter XII, to execute President Taylor’s arrest warrant, he said the Security Council had not yet discussed the suggestion that there should be Chapter XII status in support of the Court’s indictments.  It was a tricky area that the Council would handle sensibly.  He did not think the Council would do anything between now and its potential visit to Monrovia to affect the situation one way or the other.  He also doubted whether the Council would get into the immunity question.

If a multinational force went in, would it be responsible for arresting President Taylor? a correspondent asked.  He said it was the business of the Court to make arrangements with individual governments to have its decisions implemented in particular territories.  The most likely way forward was for governments to take action on indictments within their own jurisdictions.  If there were a United Nations peacekeeping operation in the country, it would have a Security Council mandate.  Within that mandate, it would have to respect the sovereign jurisdiction of that country.  In his personal view, he would not expect that mandate to include a remit to follow up the business of the Court.

In response to another question, he said President Taylor had a rather miserable set of options before him.  There was a case for saying the “least bad option” was to submit to the Court’s jurisdiction.

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