Liberia needs donors to help it find more than US$12 million so it can conduct elections in October 2005 and return to democracy after a long and bitter civil war, the head of the National Elections Commission said on Friday. The number of Liberians entitled to vote is also still not known. Estimates of the country's current population vary between 2.5 and 3 million and over 300,000 are still living in neighbouring countries where they sought refuge during the troubles.

Gyude Bryant, the chairman of Liberia's transitional government, said on Monday he was disappointed at the low number of women applying to join the country's new police force and appealed for more female candidates to come forward. The UN international police force in Liberia began training an initial batch of 150 police cadets on Monday, but only 10 of them were women.

Oxfam UK

Oxfam UK is seeking a Deputy Country Programme Manager to act as head of programmes and to devise strategies for unifying the organisation's work in Liberia. The post requires particular emphasis on livelihoods, education and gender.

On 4 July 2004, a group of police officers beat Bernard Warity, deputy information minister for administration in the National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL) headed by Charles Gyude Bryant. Warity sustained bruises on his body and is being treated at the St. Joseph Catholic Hospital in the capital, Monrovia. Speaking to Media Foundation for West Africa-Liberia from his hospital bed, Warity explained that the incident occurred at 6:00 p.m. (local time), when he was returning from watching a World Cup qualifying soccer match between Liberia and Togo.

Liberia has been in a nearly constant state of civil war for 14 years. This has taken an enormous toll on the lives of Liberian children, adolescents and all civilians. Throughout the years of civil war and especially during the 2003 War, thousands of Liberian children have been victims of killings, rape and sexual assault, abduction, torture, forced labour, forced recruitment into fighting forces and displacement and other violations by warring factions, including the government of Liberia under Charles Taylor, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL).

The head of Liberia's transitional government, Gyude Bryant, said a programme to disarm former combatants would extend to eastern Liberia, close to the border with Cote d'Ivoire, before the end of the month. UN officials told IRIN that 49,000 combatants from the three-armed factions have disarmed so far. UNMIL estimated late last year that the factions had a total of 38,000 combatants, but subsequent official estimates have fluctuated up to 60,000.

Former Liberian leader, Charles Taylor, who was indicted for war crimes by the Special Court in Sierra Leone last year, will not go unpunished for crimes committed, said Emyr Jones Parry, head of a UN Security Council delegation touring West Africa. “It is a matter of time, in due course, Taylor will face justice," said Parry. "There can not be impunity for Charles Taylor,” he said.

This year the newly established Veteran Child Soldiers Association of Liberia is taking part in the celebration of World Refugee Day organised by the Liberian Welfare Council in the Buduburam refugee settlement in Ghana. The celebration will bring together most local NGOs, music groups and dance collectives.

Diamonds have been at the centre of West Africa's nightmare for more than a decade. They helped to pay for former President Charles Taylor's 14-year rampage in Liberia and for his military adventures in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire. They were the engine of the Revolutionary United Front's horrific decade-long war in Sierra Leone. In the 1950s, Liberia became a major conduit for illicit diamonds from almost everywhere in Africa, and by the mid 1990s it had become the country of provenance for billions - not millions - of dollars worth of stolen gems. This paper argues that while diamonds represent a very small part of Liberia's potential postwar economy, they loom large in the country's political schema, and they retain their enormous potential for national and regional destabilization.

Liberia has no time or money to conduct a population census before elections in October 2005 that are due to return the country to democracy after a long and bitter civil war, Frances Johnson-Morris, the head of the National Elections Commission, said on Monday.

Shut down for a year by civil war, schools in Nimba county in northern Liberia are finally starting to reopen. But pupils are taught in wrecked classrooms with no roof to keep out the rain. They are forced to bring their own chairs from home to sit on. And their teachers have yet to receive a salary. Authorities in the town of Sanniquelle, near Liberia's northern border with Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire, have managed to reopen a few primary schools with unpaid volunteer teachers since UN peacekeeping troops were deployed there two months ago.

Despite appeals from the top U.N. envoy to Liberia and the National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL) to lift embargoes on diamonds and timber, the U.N. Security Council decided that peace in the West African country was still too fragile to lift the sanctions. "The members of the council emphasized that continuation of the measures on Liberia was not meant to be punitive for the NTGL and the Liberian people, but to ensure that the peace process was irreversible," said the council president for June, Ambassador Lauro L. Baja Jr. of the Philippines.

Speaking at a National Women's Conference on Peace and Socio-Economic Recovery in Liberia, Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) emphasized the centrality of women's participation and leadership in all phases of the country's recovery, including processes of disarmament, demobilization, and rehabilitation. She described the conference as a celebration of the courage of Liberia's women, of their resilience and capacity for leadership amidst the trauma and devastation of conflict over the past decade.

Child soldiers, uprooted from their families and plunged into Liberia's civil war, are lingering in temporary camps because they are too scared to return home and insufficient facilities have been created to cater for them, child protection agencies and a government commission said. After turning over their weapons, the young ex-combatants are entitled to a three-month stay in care centres, which offer medical aid, counselling, reading lessons and help tracing families. But the stop-gap is turning more permanent for many.

Despite the apparent move towards peace in Liberia in recent months, the situation of thousands of the country's displaced remains desperate. While many of Liberia's estimated 500,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) may wish to return to their areas of origin, very few have been able to do so. Faltering attempts to disarm the country's estimated 45,000 combatants have so far done little to reassure civilians that the tenuous peace will hold.

Under a makeshift tent in the Laine refugee camp in southern Guinea, Charlesetta Kollie, a Liberian refugee, buckles down to teach dressmaking to a new group of apprentices. Kollie's nine students have four sewing machines with which to stitch together women's garments - the camisoles and pagnes - that are common in the sub-region. Sometimes the women learn how to mend torn dresses. Their target is to learn how to sew in order to have a trade when they return to Liberia.

Since 1990, logging companies, rebel groups, criminal networks, various interim governments and the regime of former president Charles Taylor have colluded to plunder Liberia's natural resources. During this period the timber sector witnessed a plethora of illegal activities and practices. Logging companies operated in rebel held territories without any form of regulation from the Forestry Development Authority; none of the revenue generated during this period benefited the Liberian people.

Amnesty International has called on donor nations to provide adequately for the needs of an estimated 21,000 former child soldiers who are currently being disarmed in Liberia. The international group released a report on child soldiers in Liberia on Monday as the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child opened its thirty-sixth session. "The children of Liberia have been killed, made orphans, maimed, abducted, deprived of education and health care - and recruited and used as child soldiers," Amnesty said in a statement accompanying the release of its report.

The children of Liberia have been killed, made orphans, maimed, abducted, deprived of education and health care - and recruited and used as child soldiers, Amnesty International said in a new report released this week. The report, entitled "Liberia: The promises of peace for 21,000 child soldiers", calls on the National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL), leading representatives of parties to the conflict and the international community to ensure an end to the use of child soldiers and also that the needs of former child soldiers are met fully as the peace process unfolds.

In Liberia, crime has returned with vigour after the civil war. In addition to street crime and burglary, there are increasing reports of Ukrainian and Moroccan women being trafficked into Monrovia to serve as prostitutes in popular bars that double as brothels. The UN Mission in Liberia, UNMIL, says it is taking the problem seriously. UNMIL’s Civilian Police (CIVPOL) has hired an officer to address human trafficking. However, by not coordinating her efforts with NGOs and other supporting organisations, her independent actions may actually be exacerbating the problem, Refugees International says.