A Call For A National
Conference Prior To The October Elections
(An Open Letter To Stakeholders
In The Liberian Peace Process)
The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
June 6, 2005
Addressed To:
The Chairman, National Transitional Government Of
Liberia
Current Chairman, African Union
Chairman Of The African Union Commission
Executive Secetary Of Ecowas
Us Secretary Of State
Un Secretary General
Representative Of European Union
The Special Envoy Of ECOWAS
Excellencies:
The Liberian nation today in crisis faces a challenge of change and renewal. At the heart of the crisis and challenge lie crucial issues of sustainable peace based in equity and justice.
We, the undersigned, representing an important sampling of Liberian opinion leaders, subscribe to the view that as the country is poised for elections a nationally organized conversation be initiated about the essential ingredients for sustainable peace and development. We consider it imperative to clearly state that we fully support the scheduled holding of national elections in October 2005, and as such we are not advocating postponement. There is for us no conflict between the scheduled elections and the call for a prior national forum. The latter seems to us necessary because a quarter century of violent conflict has left the national social fabric in disarray, and lessons have not been learned from two failed transition processes.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2003 established institutions to address critical challenges created or exacerbated by the conflict. Challenges included disarming and demobilizing, resettlement, issues of transitional justice, governance reform, and accountable governance in the transition period. Rather than dwell on the mixed and often troubling results of the efforts well into the second (and last) year of the transition, we wish to underscore the persisting crisis and continuing challenge.
While many clamor for public office as elections loom there is no leadership that calls us to re-imagine national community. And there seems a deepening of the crisis of confidence into which the country has been plunged in recent decades. We were in the throes of a national conversation in the 1970s about redesigning the political order when military intervention aborted that process. Efforts were resumed in the 1980s through constitutional rethinking, but that too came to grief and other ambitions intervened.
Full-fledged civil war ensued and this conflict has added a pernicious layer of its own to the historic problems that have plagued the country, and that efforts were made to address in the 1970s, and again in the early 1980s. Because the civil war layer has counterparts in a number of such conflicts around the world since the end of the cold war, the tendency has been to dwell on that feature to the exclusion of root and proximate causes peculiar to Liberia.
We consider it imperative that a national forum be convened in Monrovia before the October elections to accomplish the following:
