From June 2008, Liberia’s Drug Enforcement Agency, backed by police from the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), burned more than 400,000 cannabis plants over four months in Bong county, about 100 km northeast of Monrovia, and Nimba county, near the Guinean border.[1] Officers of the Liberian National Police, UN police and a Bangladeshi contingent raided farms around Duta village in Bong County on 6 October, hiking through bush to destroy the crop.[2]
UN police commissioner Henrik Stiernblad said on 8 October that a total of 440,000 plants had been seized, destroyed or taken as evidence.[2] The agency’s director, James B. Jaddah, said the raids would have been impossible without military backup, since some growers were former civil-war fighters who had kept their weapons.[1] Government rules allow only a specially trained police unit to carry weapons, so drug agents relied on the UN for protection.[1]
The agency did not know who most of the farmers were, and owners fled or stayed far from the fields, leaving only workers behind.[1] Deputy justice minister Joseph Jalloh said the government could not retrain growers it could not identify, and that monitoring the burnt fields would be hard with only three cars and about seventy men.[1]
