allAfrica.com: Liberia: With the Ceasefire Timetable Expiring, Liberia Needs a Peace Plan, Sirleaf Says (Page 1 of 3)

Liberia: With the Ceasefire Timetable Expiring, Liberia Needs a Peace Plan, Sirleaf Says

When Liberia's political parties, warring factions and government agreed last month on a ceasefire to halt the fighting that was engulfing their capital, Monrovia, they gave themselves thirty days to negotiate a comprehensive peace plan.

Under the auspices of the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), representatives of 17 Liberian political parties, the two rebel groups, the government and various nongovernmental organizations have been meeting in Ghana to draw up a blueprint for the transition, following the projected departure of President Charles Taylor, who, under pressure from regional governments and the United States, has agreed to leave the country and take up residence in Nigeria.

With the 30-day timetable expiring today, the parties have agreed on a number of crucial issues. But several key questions remain unresolved. General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the former Nigerian military head of state who is the Ecowas chief negotiator, is trying to forge consensus on the mandate and composition of the interim administration that will replace the Taylor regime and guide Liberia to democratic elections in 18 to 24 months.

The interim government will have executive, legislative and judicial branches, but no mechanism has yet been agreed on how those posts will be filled. What has been agreed is that the president who serves during the transition will not be eligible to run for the office when elections are held, sometime in the next two years.

One prominent participant in the Ghana talks is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who heads the Unity Party and was Taylor's chief rival in the 1997 elections, when he won 75 percent of the votes and Sirleaf received just under 10 percent. "The elections were administratively free and transparent, but were conducted in an atmosphere of intimidation, as most voters believed that Taylor's forces would have resumed fighting if he had lost," the U.S. Department of State concluded.

Sirleaf, who served as Liberia's finance minister during the 1970s and was jailed on treason charges in 1985 for criticizing Samuel K. Doe, the staff sergeant who came to power in a bloody 1980 coup, is an investment banker and former assistant secretary general of the United Nations, where she headed the Africa Bureau at the UN Development Programme.

Interviewed by telephone from Accra, she described the current negotiations and discussed her interest in heading the transition.

The 30 days are up - what issues remain to be resolved?

A lot of progress has been made, and we're now at the place where we're coming together to endorse the things on which we agree, to isolate the few things on which we disagree - and those things are major. And hopefully we can resolve those disagreements within the next two or three days.

We still have some difficulties agreeing on all the elements. That's because in terms of the structure and the composition of the interim government, there are still some wide differences.

There's virtual agreement on the security aspects of the plan. There's virtual agreement on the mandate and tenure of the transitional government. However, we still don't have agreement on the structure, and certainly we don't have agreement on the composition.

The political parties favor a structure that comes close to the Constitution. The government wants a continuation of the current structure, minus Mr. Taylor. The warring parties are seeking a high-level decision-making role, something closer to the structure agreed for the DRC [the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where each rebel group was given a vice presidential position in the power-sharing government that will take office in Kinshasa today.]

Why haven't you been able to finalize an agreement?

We have to conclude we have wasted a lot of time. We've been here for six weeks. Yes, we have strong disagreements but I think we might have worked harder, focused much more, and we could have gotten stronger assistance from our support team. The fact is, we set the deadline - no one else did. I think the challenge now is to quickly make up for lost time and resolve those issues on which we have disagreement.

Can that be accomplished soon?

I think it must. Ecowas has been very helpful to us. Those who are helping to finance this have been supportive of us. Our hosts, the Ghana government and the Ghanaian people, have tolerated us. It is time we get our business done, so we can start addressing the serious needs of our people by going home and getting the transitional government in place.

But we cannot go home until the regime is changed. Mr. Taylor's presence in Liberia has been an obstacle to us reaching an early understanding. It's a big shadow hanging over everybody, particularly those that represent him. The sooner Mr. Taylor leaves the sooner the process of reordering our society can commence.

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