Two years after the conclusion of a nationwide disarmament exercise, about 39,000 former fighters have yet to be placed in skills training programmes, raising fears that they could be open to manipulation by other armed groups in the region.

At the end of the disarmament programme in November 2004, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), which supervised the exercise, reported that 101,495 fighters had been disarmed and demobilised.

Some 60,000 former fighters have been placed in skills training programs such as plumbing, carpentry and masonry, or enrolled in school.

Charles Achodo, the UN Disarmament, Demobilisation, Reintegration and Rehabilitation policy advisor, told IRIN that by the middle of this year all ex-combatants will have benefited from donor-supported reintegration packages.

"Funding to cover all of those ex-combatants has not gone dry and we have funding to cater to them, but it is a process. That process is ongoing and by the middle of 2007 all of them will be fully covered," Achodo said.

A UN commissioned nationwide survey of former fighters conducted between February and March last year recommended a continuation of skills training programmes.

"There is major risk of leaving behind a very vulnerable grouping of ex-combatants: those who have disarmed and demobilised, but have yet to receive training. This category of former fighters is the least educated, most agriculturally oriented and the poorest ... they have been the least reintegrated," the survey said.

It said that international donor funding should ensure the continuation of the programme.

Delays in providing training to the former fighters has triggered concern that they could easily be recruited as freelance fighters in other troubled countries. In addition to Liberia's 14-year civil war, there have been conflicts in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, as well as unrest in adjacent Guinea.

"If you allow those fighters to be left alone and without keeping them busy learning how to make shoes, beds, tables, or sewing and sitting in classes, their minds would always be preoccupied with going back to war where they can easily get what they want through guns," said Mariam Walker, a Liberian psycho-social counselor.

William Bayue, a former fighter of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), agrees.

"The UN must really speed up their programmes to give our friends opportunities to go to schools and learning other useful vocations where they could earn money or else you will find them leaving across the borders into [Cote d'Ivoire] where they may be paid as foreign fighters there," Bayue, 23, told IRIN.

He said he was transformed after entering secondary school in the capital, Monrovia, as part of reintegration after he relinquished his weapon.

Achodo said some ex-fighters who had not yet been reintegrated are scattered around Liberian towns bordering Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Sierra Leone. He said additional educational and skills training projects would be focused on those areas.

Press reports have circulated in Monrovia recently saying Ivorian rebels and government forces were trying to recruit former Liberian combatants. Cote d’Ivoire has been split in half since a brief civil war in 2002 and there are persistent fears that the conflict could reignite.

Lieutenant General Isaac Obiakor, force commander of the UN Mission in Liberia, said the press reports could not be confirmed but that peacekeepers had increased border patrols between Cote D'Ivoire and Liberia.

Despite disarmament and the dissolution of armed groups in Liberia, weapons are still discovered in rural areas. This is part of a larger, regional problem, officials say. An estimated eight million light arms are circulating in West Africa, according to Jeanine Jackson, the US ambassador to Burkina Faso.

"The disarmament and demobilisation programmes always do not take all of the guns and we have been carrying out community arms collections since January, sensitising community dwellers to bring out hidden weapons and this programme is really yielding results," said Napoleon Abdulai, head of the UN Development Programme-Liberia Small Arms Project.

He said civilians as well as former fighters had identified areas where arms had been hidden.

"We have retrieved thousands of [rounds of] ammunition, unexploded ordinance and other light weapons. Those are harmful to the community and our objective is to make the country gun-free," Abdulai said.

The small arms project says that last year more than 19,000 rounds of ammunition and hundreds of guns and rifles, as well as unexploded ordinance, had been collected.