ECOWAS Military Chiefs to Meet Over S.Leone CrisisDefense ministers and chiefs of staff of the 16-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are to meet Wednesday in Nigeria's capital Abuja to discuss the tense situation in Sierra Leone, said a statement by the ECOWAS secretariat.Nigeria's leading newspaper, The Guardian, Tuesday quoted the statement as saying that the ECOWAS was considering to re-deploy the West African Intervention Forces, known as ECOMOG, to Sierra Leone to restore the peace and stability in that war-torn country. Nigeria-led-and-commanded ECOMOG, replaced by the United Nations peacekeeping forces earlier this year under the 1999 Lome Peace Accord, has played a leading role in restoring the Kabbah government outed by the Revolutionary United Front(RUF) rebels led by Foday Sankoh in 1997. The forthcoming meeting came after the decision by the emergency ECOWAS' s mini-summit over Sierra Leone last week in Abuja, said the statement. Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, cote d'Ivoire, Togo, Liberia, Mali and Nigeria, members of the Joint Implementation committee for the Lome Peace Accord, were directed by the summit to convene the proposed meeting. Sierra Leone has caught the attention of international community in the past two weeks since the early May abduction of about 500 UN peacekeepers by the RUF rebels. |
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