Liberia’s president-elect, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, will use her first foreign trip to visit four West African nations in a bid to dispel her country’s reputation as a pole for regional instability.
Johnson-Sirleaf, who beat soccer star George Weah in a hotly contested presidential run-off vote three weeks ago, will travel to Ivory Coast on Tuesday to meet President Laurent Gbagbo before heading to Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Liberia and Ivory Coast are trying to emerge from civil wars in which young fighters working as guns for hire crossed their mutual borders in both directions to join whichever rebel movement or government militia would pay them.
“My consultations with Mr. Gbagbo will see what can be done to see that the two countries work together for regional peace and stability,” Johnson-Sirleaf, 67, said by telephone from her office in Liberia’s rundown capital, Monrovia.
Liberia was long seen as the epicenter of instability in West Africa, particularly under former president and warlord Charles Taylor, who stands accused of fomenting a web of conflicts in the region and lives in exile in Nigeria.
Taylor is wanted for war crimes by a U.N.-backed court in Sierra Leone. Guinea has accused him of involvement in a plot to assassinate its president, and rights groups say Liberians have been recruited recently to fight in Ivory Coast.
“The visit is intended to consolidate ties with Liberia’s immediate neighbors as well as regional partners,” said Johnson-Sirleaf’s spokesman, Augustine Ngafuai.
Taylor's extradition?
Liberia’s elections were meant to draw a line under its 14-year conflict, which ended with Taylor’s exile in 2003. Johnson-Sirleaf will be the first serving Liberian leader to visit Ivory Coast, Guinea and Sierra Leone since the war ended.
A senior official from her party said the issue of Taylor would be discussed with regional leaders. Nigeria has said it would only hand Taylor over if asked to do so by an elected Liberian government and would not send him to a third country.
“We often had problems with Liberia under Charles Taylor. Today a new era is being born with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf,” an advisor to Ivory Coast’s president Gbagbo told Reuters.
While Liberia’s elections were meant to draw a line under its 14-year conflict, which ended with Taylor’s exile in 2003, the peace process in Ivory Coast remains deadlocked, with the belligerents arguing over the latest U.N. plan.
Gbagbo’s mandate ended on Oct. 30 but a U.N. resolution allows him to stay for up to a year to work towards elections in the country -- split between a rebel north and government south, with 10,000 peacekeepers in the middle.
Some diplomats in Monrovia fear renewed instability in Ivory Coast, whose civil war blew out of a failed coup attempt against Gbagbo in September 2002, could disrupt the wider region.
Campaign group Human Rights Watch said last month that Ivory Coast’s government was offering hundreds of dollars to recruit former combatants in Liberia, including children, to fight rebels opposing Gbagbo in the world’s top cocoa grower.
Ivorian authorities have long denied such accusations.