Liberia's
peace depends on
winning the battle against
theft of mineral resources
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
October 19, 2005
LONDON - Whoever wins the Liberian
election, which now goes to a second round, will confront
the question: how can Liberia avoid a resumption of
politics-as-plunder?
Charles Taylor, Liberia's and
Africa's plunderer (and murderer)-in-chief, may be off
the scene but the interim government that has presided
over Liberia in the preparations for the recent elections
has shown that raping raw material resources is deep in
the sinews of Liberian politics. In March, a UN panel
reported that Liberian officials had signed a secret
contract with a European company that gave it a virtual
monopoly to sell Liberian diamonds, even though Liberia
has been banned from selling its diamonds by the UN until
the UN certifies that transparent and accountable
procedures are being followed.
Although the two front-runners in
Liberia's presidential contest are known for their
probity and integrity and doubtless will want to get on
top of the problem, the second and third layers of
government will be another matter. What remains of a
decimated civil service is corrupt to the core and so are
the wheelers and dealers who will crowd in, offering
their services to a leader who from the onset will be
beleaguered. There are few, if any, governmental levers
for the president to pull and everything will have to be
"fixed" by political plumbers hired for specific tasks.
As for oversight, there is almost no one still alive who
can do the job and the press is a pale shadow of what
used to exist in the pre-Taylor era.
Africa's mineral riches have been
the undoing of many countries - in Liberia's neighbour
Sierra Leone, whose war lords worked together with Taylor
fuelling their savagery with proceeds from alluvial
diamonds, and in the Congo and Angola. Laurent Kabila,
who ousted the Congo's previous dictator, Mobutu, built
up his rebel movement by mining and trafficking in
alluvial gold in the hilly terrain of the province of
South Kivu. Today outsiders, like the Ugandan troops
operating inside the Congo, appear to have been
trafficking in gold and coltan. Even in Nigeria, where
the government of Olusegun Obasanjo is making a vigorous
attempt to bring its burgeoning oil and gas sector under
more transparent supervision, there are still reports of
corruption among senior figures.
It is not only Africa that has
suffered this way. Sapphires, rubies and timber banked
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In Afghanistan, the late
Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of the United Front,
financed his militias with the sale of emeralds and lapis
lazuli.
Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of
the University of Oxford have shown that
resource-dependent countries are more prone to civil war.
They argue against the shibboleths that the recent wars
in developing countries owe themselves to inequality
(Brazil has never had a civil war despite its atrocious
inequalities), or that it's ancient hatreds (the history
that matters is always recent history). What appears to
matter most is if the economy is poor, second that it is
declining and third that it is dependent on natural
resource exports.
If war could be stopped in this
type of country the number of wars in the world, which in
fact have been steadily declining for over 10 years,
would be reduced to a literal handful. The peace recently
achieved by UN peacekeepers in Liberia, Sierra Leone and
Angola suggests the goal is within reach. The question
for today is how to copper bottom these peaces.
Diamonds, easily transportable,
have been the thugs' best friend. Belatedly, the diamond
producing and consumer nations have set up together with
the private sector the so-called Kimberley Process
Certification Scheme which, if by no means watertight, is
working effectively to discipline the industry from
cooperating with the black market. The British prime
minister, Tony Blair, has given the cause a push by
launching an initiative for the reporting of resource
revenues by multinational companies working in extractive
industries.
Yet, according to Michael Peel of
the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Britain
has been slow "to keep its side of the bargain on
tackling corruption". Britain's Export Credits Guarantee
Department "has shown little inclination to follow up
allegations that a consortium including MW Kellogg, a
client, agreed to pay $170m of bribes to secure billions
of dollars of work on a giant Nigerian gas plant."
Liberia's free and peaceful
elections are a remarkable success story, achieved by the
cooperation of nations. Perhaps deploying peacekeepers is
the easy part. Now, behind the scenes, nuts and bolts
must be screwed into place to secure the future. Are the
western countries capable of that?
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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