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 | Sunday, May 07, 2000, updated at 11:28(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Sierra Leone Hostage Crisis DeepensThe United Nations searched on Saturday for ways of rushing extra troops to Sierra Leone, where almost 500 of its peacekeepers are in the hands of rebels or have gone missing in the jungle.UN officials, who accuse veteran rebel leader Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of holding at least 278 peacekeepers and support staff, acknowledged that they had lost contact with a further 200 men -- members of a Zambian contingent. With foreign nationals starting to leave the West African nation, hundreds of women marched to Sankoh's home in the capital Freetown calling for peace. He declined to meet them. "The negotiations are ongoing," UNAMSIL spokesman Philip Winslow told a Freetown news conference. "Many African leaders are in touch with Mr Sankoh." So far, the negotiations have brought the release of a supply helicopter, its four-man crew and two civilian passengers but there has been little sign of an early end to the standoff. "There is an improvement in the security situation in the country. Only Makeni and Magburaka remain tense," the military spokesman of the UN peacekeeping force, Lieutenant-Colonel Jaswinder Singh Sandhu, told the news conference. Makeni and Magburaka, in the centre of the impoverished former British colony, were the scene of bloody clashes between Sankoh loyalists and peacekeepers on Tuesday and Wednesday. UN officials say four peacekeepers are missing presumed dead after the clashes, which began as a dispute over disarmament under the country's 1999 peace deal. Sankoh says six of his men were killed. UN officials report rebel movements, possibly in captured UN armoured personnel carriers, but say that there has been no shooting since sporadic exchanges in Makeni on Thursday. The crisis is the biggest challenge so far to the peace deal and a major test of the resolve of the 8,700-strong United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), which has taken over the job of policing it. UNAMSIL was due to reach full strength Of 11,100 by July. Russia has offered help with airlifts. The United States has been asked to help ferry in a Bangladeshi battalion. Sankoh, some of whose rebels and their allies hacked limbs off innocent civilians in a reign of terror at the height of the civil war, is once again the target of international outrage. Washington and others have raised the prospect of prosecutions and sanctions. Sankoh, who won an amnesty and a seat in government under the peace deal, insists, to widespread disbelief, that his men hold no hostages. The foreign community in Sierra Leone has dwindled and, excluding the peacekeeping operation, is thought to number just several hundred. Dozens left on Saturday. "It is the same thing again but it is worse because at least in January 1999 there was a resistance," Father Jerome Pistoni, one of 13 Italian Roman Catholic priests taking the helicopter out of Freetown, told Reuters. In January 1999 rebels came close to taking the capital before a Nigerian-led West African intervention force fought them off. An estimated 5,000 people died in the fighting. "The rebels are coming. They have reached Lunsar. It's not far," Father Jerome said, accusing peacekeepers of surrendering without putting up a fight. Lunsar is about 75 miles (120 km) from Freetown, on the road to Makeni. Worldwide, diplomatic pressure is mounting on Sierra Leone' s rebels over the weekend to free the hundreds of UN staff taken hostages. According to reports reaching Lagos from the west African nation's capital Freetown, Nigerian and Malian delegations had met with rebel leader Foday Sankoh at his Freetown home, where he is under surveillance by UN soldiers. Sierra Leonean Information Minister Julius Spencer had earlier said that head of Libya, Moammar Gadhafi, who has longtime ties to Sankoh, had also sent a foreign ministry delegation to meet with Sankoh. In another report, a UN spokesman in Freetown was quoted as saying that a new count had revised the hostage number as 300 other than the former 278. He said there was no fighting reported Saturday anywhere in the country. "The situation is better (than Friday) but continues to remain tense," he said. Hundreds of women marched past by Sankoh's house, chanting "We want peace!" and calling on the rebels to free their hostages, said the report. The United Nations also said Saturday that it has lost contact with another 200 peacekeeping troops in Sierra Leone. They are soldiers from Zambia. Commenting on the incident, Zambian President Frederick Chiluba said Saturday that the Zambians had been captured and apparently not been harmed. He said it was too early to lay blame for what happened, but said the group's capture would not affect Zambia's commitment to the Sierra Leone peace. The UN said that peacekeepers controlled the town. Meanwhile, The European Union agreed on Saturday to send foreign policy chief Javier Solana on a rescue mission to the Philippines to help free 21 mostly foreign hostages held by Moslem rebels. "The decision has been taken in principle, but it's subject to the approval of the Philippine authorities," a spokesman for Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel said at the end of the first day of a two-day meeting of EU foreign ministers on the mid-Atlantic Azores islands. EU sources said that the former NATO Secretary General would probably head to Manila on Monday, for one of his most delicate diplomatic missions since taking up his newly-created post last October. Portuguese Foreign Minister Jaime Gama, who chaired the meeting on behalf of the EU's Portuguese presidency, said an official announcement on the move to end the hostage crisis would be made on Sunday and confirmed he had been given a mandate to talk to the Manila authorities. "We want very much to contribute for the liberation of hostages but we must handle it in the appropriate manner," he told a news conference. France, Germany and Finland, whose nationals are among the hostages, had approached Solana, who had said he would carry out the mission only if he won the support of all 15 EU states. The EU ministers are expected to issue a statement on Sunday condemning the kidnappings and urging release of the captives and diplomats said earlier Solana's mission would be to explain the bloc's concerns rather than to mediate. Solana was made into the EU's first foreign policy representative last year in an attempt to give the EU a louder voice in the world's trouble spots. Diplomats said, however, that the EU was determined to tread delicately in the Philippines to avoid sending "negative signals" to the Manila authorities, which the EU insists remains responsible for settling the hostage crisis.
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