S Leone rebels free 139 peacekeepers in Liberia

S Leone rebels free 139 peacekeepers in Liberia
REUTERS

FREETOWN, MAY 15: Sierra Leone rebels have freed 139 UN hostages in the first sign of a breakthrough in a two-week-long crisis that threatened to overwhelm the world's biggest peacekeeping operation, a UN spokesman said on Monday.

David Wimhurst said the freed peacekeepers had been sent to neighbouring Liberia. Fifteen were in Liberia's capital Monrovia and the remainder were in the Liberian border town of Foya. ``This is obviously a very positive development. It shows that the crisis around our detained personnel is moving into a new phase,'' Wimhurst told Reuters.

Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, who have been flouting a 1999 peace deal, took hostage or surrounded several hundred peacekeepers in early May, following a dispute over disarmament near the central town of Makeni. Their action wrong-footed the ill-prepared UN force which at one stage looked like being swamped by a rebel advance on the capital. A British evacuation force helped secure Freetown and restore UN confidence. ``We hope very much that all of our detained personnel will be released as soon as possible and brought back to Sierra Leone,'' Wimhurst said. The United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone now the largest UN peacekeeping operation in the world, numbers more than 9,000 troops and the world body is pulling out all stops to boost it to its full-strength of 11,100.

UN peacekeepers and British paratroops with modern equipment guard strategic positions in the Capital and the British commander said that the city was now secure. ``As of now, the situation has improved significantly,'' Sierra Leone's Information Minister, Julius Spencer, told BBC Radio on Monday. ``It appears even the UN force that is here has changed its posture and is more prepared to defend the innocent civilians than they were about two weeks ago,'' he said.

RUF fighters terrorised civilians in the former British colony at the height of an eight-year-long civil war. They and their allies, former soldiers who briefly toppled elected President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, hacked off hands and limbs of their captives with machetes. UN officials said on Sunday that the rebels continued to hold or pin down 486 peacekeepers, mostly Zambians.

President Kabbah, in a broadcast to the nation on Sundayappealed to the RUF to release the hostages, saying that their cause was lost and that they should hand in their weapons. ``Let them know that there is no reason to detain foreign nationals, that they must release them immediately, unharmed and unconditionally,'' Kabbah said.

RUF leader Foday Sankoh, a key player in the crisis, has not been seen since a shootout with rival forces at his Freetown residence on May 8. Sankoh, whose men are holding the country's lifeblood, the diamond mines, disappeared after rival fighters stormed his home. There are growing calls in Sierra Leone for Sankoh to face an international tribunal for war crimes.

But the overall commander of the UN force, Indian Major-General V.K. Jetley, told a Sunday news conference that he believed that it was important to negotiate with Sankoh. ``He is the cult figure... I think we have to negotiate with him,'' Jetley said.