The News Review:

- Mental health trust to twin with Sierra Leone
- Meeting with the Africa Commission in Rome on 27 May 2005
- LIBERIA: Former rebel fighters dig for diamonds, small-scale mining…

Mental health trust to twin with Sierra Leone
Ham and High Broadway – May 27, 2005
uk27 May 2005 HEALTH chiefs in Haringey have announced a project to twin the mental health services with those in the desperately under-resourced Sierra Leone. The West African country is recovering from a brutal conflict and rated as one of the poorest in the world. And Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health trust has set up sponsorship, training and fundraising arrangements with the country, which only has one qualified psychiatric nurse for a population of 5. Trust assistant director Shaun Collins, who has spent three years raising money for the Kissy Mental Hospital in Sierra Leone, said: “We hope that the support and expertise we can give through training and fundraising will develop vitally needed mental health services for the people of Sierra Leone.

Meeting with the Africa Commission in Rome on 27 May 2005
10 Downing Street – 10 Downing Street (press release) – May 27, 2005
We need to support African peace keeping and peace enforcement missions. Any of the conflicts in Africa are preventable, if we have sufficient numbers of forces, from Africa, trained in order to do it. When Britain intervened in Sierra Leone some years ago, it took only just over 1,000 troops to prevent Sierra Leone changing from a democracy to a dictatorship. In Sudan today, if there were sufficient numbers of Africa Union peace-keepers, we would not have the problem that we have. So we need to do that as well. We need to make sure that the African countries adopt a peer review group mechanism for ensuring that there is good governance and no corruption. People in Africa need to feel the benefit of the aid.

LIBERIA: Former rebel fighters dig for diamonds, small-scale mining…
IRINnews.org – May 27, 2005
“It’s a security concern for Liberia and the region if natural resources are being extracted without government control,” Lundberg of Global Witness said. “Who’s involved? Where is the money going? And what are the profits being spent on?” Selling diamonds for weapons has been a familiar component of several conflicts in West Africa in recent years. The decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone which officially ended in January 2002 was mainly fuelled by blood diamonds. Locally-mined gems helped to fund warlords during the 1989-2003 Liberian conflict. And when insurgents crossed the Liberian border into Guinea in 2000, they made straight for the country’s diamond mining area before being beaten back by the army. Nobody really knows how much money diamond mining currently generates for those involved in the trade, but a UN panel of experts estimated this year that illegal production in Liberia was worth about $350,000 per month. Willie Mulbah, a deputy minister at the Ministry of Land and Mines, said the country exported about 300,000 carats per year before the civil war, mostly gem quality stones from the northwest of the country.