The United Nations should maintain its ban on diamond and timber exports from Liberia even when the country's new government is in place, the world body's own experts said in a report on Friday, according to Reuters. The "chronic corruption and incompetence" of a transitional government set up after the end of a civil war in 2003 when warlord and then-President Charles Taylor went into exile, meant the bans should be maintained, a U.N. panel of experts said. "Should sanctions be lifted on diamonds and timber there is little reason to believe that government revenue will be directed to the budget to be used for the benefit of the Liberian people," they said. A new government headed by former World Bank economist Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who won a presidential run-off last month, is due to take power in January after the first elections since the end of the war, in which a quarter of a million people died.
