Maintaining Peace and Stability in the Mano River Basin: A 6-Year Initiative

Written by By Willie Benson, Jr. willierbensonjr@yahoo.com +231886557159
Wednesday, 22 February 2012 14:04
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Introduction

Everywhere on this planet people need freedom to live, freedom to move, freedom to speak, freedom to associate and freedom to participate in activities that affect them and their lives. But living in one’s individual domain in whatever stratum of our world in a peaceful and stable environment means even more firstly than the very basic freedom we must have because freedom is actualized in an environment of peace and there can be no true freedom when there is no peace.

I truly understand why folks in discussions of International Relations maintain that peace is the absence of war and war the absence of peace vice versa. This certainly does not mean always the perpetration or cessation of conventional or guerilla warfare, but simply that the inexistence or loss of one’s peace of mind, as simple as it may be considered, can be as dangerous as a catastrophe. As a student of Conflict and Peace Study at the Kofi Annan Institute for Conflict Transformation, I assert a couple of reasons why peace and stability have been sustained in the Mano River (MRU) sub-region during the last six years with Liberia playing the lead role.

The Issue

Few years ago the image of Liberia was tinted around the world as a country of belligerent people with no regard absolutely for human dignity and the rule of law. Citizens of Liberia living in foreign lands, especially in ECOWAS countries were monitored on surveillance of reconnoitering for mercenary missions of possible attacks that would potentially be unleashed from home. Some of these compatriots suffered harsh treatments such as incarceration by their hosts, their only option being to return to their native war-ravished homeland which lurched fatally in fragility.

Leaders of both regional groupings (ECOWAS and the MRU) had spent so much of their countries’ human and material resources to help return sanity to the war-torn nation. Of course Liberia’s neighbors felt threatened in all of their sacrifices as next door Sierra Leone was now engulfed with a full-scale catastrophic conflict whilst rifles of mutiny soldiers echoed in other parts of the neighborhood with pointing fingers that Liberia was the mastermind.

The image of Liberia was truly at stake and needed to be rebuilt. How could such dark clouds hanging over a devastating country be removed at a time that even some Liberians in the diaspora had reached individual conclusions to avoid their reproach, vowing never to return home? How could Liberians break the belief that their country was being used to engineer incursions and insurrections in the neighborhood?

Addressing the Issue

Holding national elections that led to the presidency in 2006 of Africa’s lone female elected head of state ever, there were views that the sub-regions might be further ignited with conflicts at even higher intensity than the continent had witnessed. This was an unfortunate misjudgment on the part of individuals who were playing blind eyes to the evolving 21st Century reality of women graduating from domestic backseat roles to leadership in whatever sphere of life.

The primary focus of the new president, in my view, was to stabilize her own country in the first place by maintaining the multi-national United Nations force on the ground to respond to situations that could spark renewed tension and violence until such time when a national army and police force could be put in place, a measure I had ardently hoped the Taylor government could earlier engender with the regional group (ECOMOG) remaining on Liberian soil to assist in the restructuring of the Armed Forces of Liberia despite him at the time being at odds with some of his colleagues from a couple of troops-contributing countries.

Secondly, I believe strongly that the new president knew that none of the conflict situations ever dropped from outer space, but rather from neighboring countries, thus it was expedient to mend fences with her colleagues and engage them vigorously in diplomacies of confidence-building and bilateral and multilateral collaborations.

Though few countries recently suffered post-election clashes, leaders of the Mano River Basin and ECOWAS have since revived their relations, visiting each other, attending functions such as regional summits, inaugurations, and holding collaborative talks that bring benefits to their peoples. A key component of the dividends accrued from these initiatives over the last few years was the creation of a single regional [ECOWAS] passport that allows citizens of the sub-region to travel within, graduating from the loaded security constraints that were associated with regional travels. The efforts also being made towards a single currency for the sub-region should be continued to boost the economy of every member state.

Conclusion

African leaders from other regions need to employ such mechanism so as to keep their countries and regions peaceful and stable. It is my belief that when African leaders put on a posture of desiring peace in their neighborhoods, the continent will rise from conflicts to peace to meet the growing challenges of development the West boasts of.

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