Home | UNICEF in Action | Highlights | Information Resources | Donations, Greeting Cards & Gifts | Press Centre | Voices of Youth | About UNICEF

Ceasefire allows relief efforts in Monrovia

Friday, 21 June 1996: A two-week old ceasefire between warring factions is enabling UNICEF to provide humanitarian assistance to children and women in Liberia's war-ravaged capital of Monrovia.

Responding to a serious water shortage, UNICEF has chlorinated 4,500 wells that supply 750,000 people, thus helping to forestall water-borne epidemics, especially among the 650,000 people - half the city's population - displaced by the fighting and living in unhygienic and overcrowded temporary shelters.

UNICEF is also supplying vaccines and immunization equipment to health centres, treating an estimated 25,000 people since the crisis began.

A UNICEF-supported programme to indentify and treat children traumatized by atrocities has screened 3,640 children in the shelters and orphanages through drama, dance and play. Of these, 400 needed and received individual or group therapy. UNICEF plans to expand the programme with four more teams.

The peace accord also enabled casualty estimates to be made: 3,000 dead, many of them children. A quarter of the 320 corpses retrieved and buried by Ministry of Health teams were those of children under 10, many of them child soldiers.

UNICEF is concerned that equipment looted from various agencies is still being taken out of Liberia, and sees the situation as volatile, although the redeployment of ECOMOG, the West African peacekeeping force, has improved security in Monrovia. UNICEF is therefore limiting itself to life-saving interventions, as the lack of security still puts relief workers and equipment at risk.

Home | UNICEF in Action | Highlights | Information Resources | Donations, Greeting Cards & Gifts | Press Centre | Voices of Youth | About UNICEF