Liberia and its neighbouring countries today signed a series of agreements with the UN refugee agency, giving Liberian refugees the right to choose repatriation starting on October 1. The Liberian government and UNHCR signed three separate agreements with the governments of Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea and Sierra Leone to set the main legal and operational framework for the voluntary return of more than 340,000 Liberian refugees scattered around the region. An agreement was also signed with the government of Ghana on September 22 in Accra.

The first meeting of the power sharing transitional government convened on September 20, 2004 with participants expressing serious concerns about the limited capacity of the government to deliver basic services to Liberians. While Liberia has made remarkable progress towards peace, there is still a lack of adequate funding for the reintegration and rehabilitation of ex-combatants, as well as for the return of refugees and the resettlement of internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The National Immunization Day of the polio eradication program is expected to take place between October 6 and 12 and November 18 and 22, with about 819,000 children below the age of five years expected to be vaccinated. In order to provide support for the eradication of polio, UNICEF Representative to Liberia, Angela Kearney, appealed to the media to become more involved in promoting the campaign.

Refugees returning to Liberia later this year under the auspices of a UN repatriation programme will face starvation unless donors urgently provide more money to feed them, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned. Justin Bagirishya, the head of WFP in Liberia, said chronic shortages in the food supply pipeline had forced him to make a further cut this month in the rations handed out to nearly 740,000 people who already receive food aid.

The head of the UN mission in Liberia said on Wednesday that the war-scarred country's disarmament programme would officially end on October 30 and any former fighters found with weapons after then would be prosecuted. "We obviously want to disarm everyone. We are now looking at the date of 30 October as the end of the programme," Jacques Klein, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative in Liberia, told reporters.

The head of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) criticised donors last Thursday for failing to fund the resettlement and retraining of former combatants in Liberia once they had been disarmed. "Much effort has been put into disarmament and demobilization, but not as much effort has gone into funding reintegration and rehabilitation...and that is worrisome," Carol Bellamy told reporters at the end of a three-day visit to Liberia to assess the reintegration of former child soldiers.

There are so few working hospitals and health clinics in southeastern Liberia that patients in one district have to be ferried by canoe to neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire to receive any treatment at all, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a report on medical facilities in the area. The report, based on an assessment carried out by an ICRC team between 15 and 25 July, said the health services in the six remote counties of southeastern Liberia had virtually collapsed during 14 years of civil war.

Liberians impatient to return home after 14 years of civil war are finding out that it takes more than resilience to begin a new life in the face of so much destruction, lack of income-earning opportunities and insecurity in some places. Juliet Massaquoi, a 24-year-old mother of four children, came back to Ganta in northern Liberia's Nimba county two weeks ago.

Hopes were raised on 18 August last year that Liberia’s protracted human rights crisis would finally end but major challenges remain, Amnesty International says in a new report. "The Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in Accra augured well for the Liberian people who had suffered more than a decade of appalling human rights abuses. But one year later, despite some major advances, progress towards ensuring protection of human rights is disappointingly slow," the organization said. Harassment, intimidation, extortion, forced labour and looting are reported to continue in Lofa County, still controlled by forces of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), and in the south-eastern counties of Sinoe, Grand Kru, River Gee and Maryland, where forces of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) still hold sway.

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The Country Manager will be responsible for the management and development of Merlin's Liberia Programme. The successful applicant will have a minimum of three years experience in a management position in an NGO environment, an understanding of security management and experience of working in an emergency context.

More than 1,000 former fighters of the LURD rebel movement are holed up in Liberia's second largest rubber plantation and are refusing to turn in their guns to UN peacekeepers, a member of Liberia's transitional parliament said on Tuesday. Residents living on and near the Guthrie plantation, about 30 km northwest of the capital Monrovia, have complained of harassment by the fighters and have reported that they are illegally tapping rubber from the plantation, he told IRIN, speaking on behalf of village chiefs in the region.

"The International Community, in short, needs to continue to actively engage in the region. Among the UN staff in Liberia today, the talk is that Guinea is the next flashpoint, and some opportunistic staffers are already learning French for a future posting to Guinea. Peacekeeping in West Africa, in other words, is becoming a growth industry. This should not be allowed to happen," writes Lansana Gberie in this feature on www.zmag.org

Concerns over security in some parts of rural Liberia and the battered state of the country's infrastructure will limit the number of refugees able to return home from neighbouring West African countries later this year, the UN refugee agency UNHCR has warned. "We do not want a situation where more (refugees) than we planned return because most of them would end up in internally displaced camps since the facilities are not adequate to receive large numbers of people," Golam Abbas, the deputy head of UNHCR in Liberia told IRIN.

About 60% of the 42 000 Liberian refugees mostly residing in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in the Central Region will now have the opportunity to undergo training in Information Communication Technology, the Vice President for the Association for the Reconstruction of Liberia, an Accra-based NGO, Mr. James B. Kollie Snr said. This is in addition to 1000 refugees who are expected to enrol in Ghanaian Universities and Polytechnics throughout the country.

A long-running power struggle for the leadership of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement has spilled over into violence on the streets of the capital Monrovia, forcing UN peacekeeping forces to send in tanks and step up street patrols. Jacques Klein, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative in Liberia, warned both sides on Wednesday that the UN peacekeeping force would not allow them to undermine the country's peace process.

As dictated by canons of police ethics, which instruct officers to respect the constitutional rights of all people to liberty, equality, and justice, law enforcement officers are supposed to be the leading human rights protectors and promoters everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, due to lack of training and discipline, poor leadership, and political manipulation, law enforcement personnel often engage in unprofessional conduct that leads to abuses of human rights.

The United Nations has poured 15,000 peacekeepers into Liberia and more than 54,000 former combatants have been disarmed, but UN officials admit that not everyone is handing in a weapon and vast tracts of the West African country remain inaccessible to UN patrols. Officially the news is very upbeat. According to figures collated by the UN Mission in Liberia, (UNMIL), 54,525 combatants had been disarmed by 12 July. However, only 17,906 weapons were collected from them- an average of one rifle, rocket launcher, pistol or mortar round for every three fighters.

Tens of thousands of Liberians who have registered as refugees in neighbouring Guinea are crossing the border to trade their food rations and prepare their eventual return before returning to their camps for the next handout, aid workers said. Aid workers admit that this unofficial flow of food across the border is probably helping to keep thousands of needy people fed in outlying districts of war-ravaged Liberia, where rebel gunmen still control the border. Recent attempts to clamp down on wandering Liberian refugees by counting the population that is actually resident in four official refugee camps in Guinea's southeastern Forest Region have sparked violence.

Thousands of the 350,000 Liberians who fled abroad as refugees to neighbouring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire and other West African countries as far away as Ghana and Nigeria, have begun the long trek home. They have been unwilling to wait for the UN refugee agency UNHCR to begin its official mass repatriation programme in October once the rains end and Liberia's dirt roads become more possible. UNHCR estimates that about 50,000 refugees have already spontaneously made the journey home since Liberia's three warring factions signed a peace deal in August 2003.

A magisterial court in Monrovia, presided over by Judge Joseph Fayiah, has placed an injunction on publication of the privately-owned "New Broom" newspaper. According to Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) sources in Liberia, a 14 July 2004 letter signed by the court clerk instructed all printing houses in the country not to print "New Broom" because the newspaper's management had failed to appear in court to answer to contempt charges.