Officials: Sierra Leone rebels, government agree to cease-fire

ABUJA, Nigeria - Sierra Leone's brutal rebel movement and the government agreed to a 30-day cease-fire during talks aimed at ending the country's nine-year civil war, Sierra Leone officials said Friday.

In a statement broadcast on Sierra Leone state radio, the government said the agreement would go into effect one minute before midnight on Friday.

Both sides agreed to end hostilities and the rebels agreed to cooperate with a United Nations-supervised disarmament program set up last year, the statement said. Government rule would be re-established throughout the ''entire territory of Sierra Leone,'' the statement added.

U.N. peacekeepers would monitor the agreement and begin deploying in rebel-held areas, and both the rebels and government would review the deal in 30 days, the statement added.

Rebel representatives were not immediately available for comment. West African officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, and overseeing the talks in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, confirmed both sides had reached an agreement, but were fine-tuning the language before signing the document.

The discussions involved the government of the West African country and a seven-member Revolutionary United Front delegation. Representatives of the United Nations and the West African regional body known as ECOWAS were also involved, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said in New York.

In London, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook warned that Britain - which has some 600 troops retraining Sierra Leone's shattered army - would be monitoring the agreement to make sure the rebels abided by its terms.

''While this is a very positive development we are not complacent. This is not the time to drop our guard,'' Cook said in a statement.

Since the war began in 1991, the rebels have abandoned three peace deals. In the latest instance, the renegades reignited Sierra Leone's civil war in May, nearly a year after a peace accord signed in Lome, Togo granted them government posts and amnesty for war crimes in return for laying down their arms.

''The RUF has a history of failing to live up to its commitments. We will be watching its actions very closely,'' Cook said, adding that the ''real proof'' of the rebels' peace commitment hinged on whether they give up control of lucrative diamond fields that finance the renegades' war chest.

A 13,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force, the world's largest current U.N. deployment, is pretty much all that stands between Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital, and the rebels who continue to control much of the country's interior - including the diamond-rich east. Despite the ongoing British-supervised training program, Sierra Leone's army, ravaged by years of war and political turmoil, is not seen as capable of holding off an RUF offensive on its own.

The U.N. mission has been riven with organizational problems and infighting. Two major contributors, India and Jordan, have announced they will pull out.

On Friday, U.N. spokesman Patrick Coker said in Freetown that the troop pullout, ''based on the security assessment so that there would be no vacuum in the withdrawal, has begun.''

He declined to give full details of the withdrawal, but said Nigerians and Ghanaians would be taking over from the departing soldiers in some areas.

While U.N. officials say the country is largely calm, fighting has picked up in recent weeks with the end of Sierra Leone's rainy season.

The civil war has forced more than one-quarter of Sierra Leone's 4.2 million people from their homes and killed tens of thousands. Thousands of civilians have had their hands and arms hacked off in a horrific rebel terror campaign.