Liberia risks dragging an entire African region back to war unless the government and foreign donors salvage its ruined economy after postwar elections next month, an independent think-tank said on Wednesday.
Presidential and parliamentary polls due on October 11 are meant to draw a line under one of modern Africa's most brutal wars, which ended in 2003 after destroying a once-thriving economy and spawning a generation of young gunmen.
"Getting it right over the next year in Liberia would help move the entire Mano River Basin region (including neighbouring Sierra Leone and Guinea) in the right direction," Brussels-based Crisis Group said in a published report.
"Getting it wrong would probably seal the region's fate for years to come as the theatre of a nomadic war in which aimless young men roamed from one country to another, seeking the most lucrative sites to loot," it said.
Images of child soldiers high on marijuana or amphetamines shocked the world during Liberia's conflict and other intertwined wars in West Africa.
Some former fighters from Liberia, many of them too young to remember peace at home, have been lured into festering conflicts in neighbouring countries like Ivory Coast by the promise of clothes and money, rights groups and civilians say.
Liberia, home to one of the largest United Nations peacekeeping missions in the world, is still without running water or electricity two years after the war ended and job prospects for ex-combatants are dim.
Unemployment is over 80 percent in a country where almost two thirds of the population are under 29 years old.
Liberia's plight has been exacerbated by rampant corruption among members of a transitional government made up largely of former belligerents still bent on plundering its rich mineral resources, diplomats, donors and local residents say.
The national budget has shrunk to just $80 million a year from nearer $500 million before the war, and a large amount of the current funds are earmarked for travel by ministers rather than for rebuilding schools, hospitals or roads.
Donors, who say they have already pumped millions of dollars of aid into Liberia only to see it squandered, are insisting they be allowed to closely monitor state spending and have threatened to withhold funding unless they can do so.
Crisis Group said Liberia's peace process risked being sabotaged if Liberian elites refused to allow "some form of intrusive economic governance mechanism" and if international partners pulled out of the country too soon after the polls.
The country, whose rich diamond, iron ore and timber reserves fuelled the civil war, could regain its position as one of the more successful economies in West Africa if governance improved and security could be assured, Crisis Group said.
"Liberia could surpass Sierra Leone in all major indicators within three to five years and within ten years stand once again solidly ahead of other countries in the region," it said.
"But if the theft and impunity that have characterised the transitional government are not corrected, Liberia would likely follow in Sierra Leone's footsteps...failing to create jobs for young men and sliding back into war by the end of the decade."
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