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Thousands of Liberians Parade to Protest U.N. Sanctions
Thousands of Liberians, including President Charles Taylor's wife, Saturday paraded through the streets of the capital Monrovia to protest the United Nations proposed sanctions on the west African country, according to reports reaching here from Monrovia.
Several thousand people, most of them women, head for the European Union offices and the United States embassy, where the protesters delivered a 13-point resolution to the EU and the U.S. diplomats, urging international mediation to end conflicts between Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
As a last attempt to head off the sanctions, Taylor, who has been accused of fomenting the decade civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone in the interest of "blood diamonds", Saturday flew to Togo and met President Gnassingbe Eyadema, current chairman of the Organization for African Unity, for help.
Earlier on Thursday, Taylor urged the U.N. Security Council to give his country one last chance to prove it had cut off support for the rebels, saying it had expulsed the members of Sierra Leone 's rebels from its territory, frozen their financial assets and banned its trade in diamonds.
However, President of the Security Council James Cunningham Friday announced that additional U.N. sanctions designed to force Liberia to withdraw its support for the rebels in Sierra Leone will take into force on next Monday.
The additional sanctions will ban Liberia's diamond exports and restrict foreign travel by its senior officials aimed at punishing Liberia and Taylor in particular. The United Nations has already imposed an existing arms embargo on the country.
According to a report by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Liberian government still maintains relations with Sierra Leone's rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in violation of a United Nations resolution on March 7.
In March the U.N. Security Council stayed the imposition of sanctions on Liberia following a plea from Economic Community of West African States for Liberia to be given 60 days to address concerns of the Security Council. The deadline expires on May 7.
The Security Council alleges that Liberia is involved in gun- running and diamond smuggling with rebels of the RUF in Sierra Leone that has been fueling war in that country for a decade. Liberia, however, denies the allegations.
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