LIBERIA: Liberia's new president has given the clearest signal yet that she wants to hand over Charles Taylor, the exiled warlord, to a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.
Taylor has lived in Nigeria since stepping down as Liberian president in 2003. A hasty peace deal allowed him to leave as rebels closed in on his capital. However, prosecutors in Sierra Leone accuse him of fuelling a decade-long civil war there.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who was sworn in as president last week, said she did not "want to leave him where he was", but would act only if she could be sure his supporters would not return the country to anarchy.
"We are consulting with west African leaders to meet international requirement in such a way that it does not destabilise our country where peace is very, very fragile," she said. "Whatever decision we take will be a decision that has the consent of our neighbours who are the ones that support our peace and security effort."
In an interview punctuated by power cuts, Africa's first female elected head of state also spelled out how she plans to tackle some of the threats to her country's stability.
Liberia is struggling to recover from years of fighting that have turned it into one of the poorest countries on the planet, despite rich reserves of iron ore, timber and diamonds.
Only those wealthy enough to afford a generator have electricity and there is no running water.
Taylor came to power in 1997 following elections held during a lull in fighting. He beat Ms Johnson-Sirleaf by a wide margin amid fears that he would reignite the eight-year-old war if defeated.
Today he lives in Nigeria, which has come under pressure from the US and UN officials to hand him to the tribunal in Sierra Leone. However, Nigeria says the decision should be taken by a democratically elected government in Liberia.
Ms Johnson-Sirleaf said the Taylor question was only one of a series of factors that could shatter Liberia's fragile peace. She had discussed spiralling instability in neighbouring Ivory Coast with visiting west African leaders.
She warned that urgent attention needed to be given to the 100,000 former combatants - many just boys - who gave up their weapons at the end of the war. Without jobs or training, she said, they would be vulnerable to troublemakers intent on recruiting militias.
"Our rehabilitation of schools, reactivation of vocational training programmes is also meant to make them key target beneficiaries so that we hope large numbers of them will be so engaged that their vulnerability will be reduced significantly."
Some 15,000 UN peacekeepers, including Irish soldiers, bolster security within Liberia. Threats to peace could even come from within the senate, which includes several of Taylor's old cronies.
One of the newly elected senators is Prince Johnson, who personally oversaw the execution of president Samuel Doe in 1989, plunging the country into years of bloodshed.
Ms Johnson-Sirleaf said she was confident that the warlords within her government were genuine in their commitment to democracy.
"I have every reason to take them at their word that they are committed to the process of peace and that they will form part of a constructive force in helping us carry out our development agenda from which all their constituencies will benefit."