Concern returns to Liberia's `hidden famine'

CONCERN is to go back into Liberia, three years after a vicious civil war in the West African state forced the withdrawal of all the Irish aid agencies.

A four-person team from the agency leaves Dublin later this week in response to what Concern's director in neighbouring Sierra Leone, Ms Anne O'Mahony, has described as a "hidden famine" in Liberia.

The team, which includes a nutritionist, two nurses and Ms O'Mahony, hopes to set up two therapeutic feeding stations at locations about 50 km from the capital, Monrovia.

Ms O'Mahony last week became the first Irish aid worker to enter Liberia in more than two years. Travelling in a convoy organised by the UN's humanitarian assistance co-ordination office, she found a countryside where the villages stand "empty and silent", their inhabitants having fled into the bush to avoid the fighting.

The people in the area she visited are in great distress, she says. "Many children were grossly malnourished, some were swollen with oedema and so puffed up that the skin on their legs had burst leaving infected sores behind. " The elderly "have a look of hunger, hardship and neglect".

In the capital, Ms O'Mahony says, the buildings remain destroyed in large areas; in others, looting has forced the abandonment of buildings. The city has neither electricity nor water supplies. The telephone system functions but is unreliable.

At one stage, the UN convoy had to turn back because of fighting between rival factions led by Roosevelt Johnson and Alhaji Kromah. At Tiene, they came across four soldiers who had been injured in fighting two hours earlier. They were, according to Ms O'Mahony, "on a high", possibly drug-induced.

Concern says it will be relying on the UN and the peace-keeping forces run by the Economic Community of West African States to provide security for the aid team.

West African leaders have threatened individual sanctions against any faction leader who tries to derail their latest peace moves. These envisage disarmament by January and elections by May.