FREETOWN (AFP) - UN peacekeepers were handing over charge of security for Freetown to Sierra Leone's nascent police and armed forces, the latest step in a staggered withdrawal after a five-year mission to restore calm to the west African state.
"We are confident in their abilities, we have tested them and seen what they are able to do and we know how to help them improve on their weaknesses," Hudson Benzu, the UN civilian police commissioner, told AFP.
"We are not going away, though -- we will be hanging around to continue to help them, to continue to train them and to reassure the public that they are ready."
At its peak, the UN mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) following a decade of savage conflict was the world's largest, involving more than 17,000 peacekeepers in the disarmament and stabilization of the country no bigger than Scotland.
But five years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, the mission is winding up its peacekeeping operations, though it will maintain a presence at least through June 2005.
Some 7,800 police officers have been trained by a cadre of international police to take over the internal security responsibilities, including manning checkpoints around the diamond-rich country.
Another 410-strong class of police cadets at the Hastings police academy, including 109 women, is expected to be out in the field within weeks, Banzu said.
National police chief Brima Acha Kamara has begun deploying his forces nationwide, sending a squadron in August to the eastern Tongo Fields area to fill a vacuum left by the departure of a battalion of Zambian soldiers.
Their training includes basic computer skills, fingerprinting, human rights and community policing. Other more experienced officers have undergone courses to qualify as police trainers and mentors.
UNAMSIL troops have pulled back from the north, south and east of Sierra Leone since May, to leave 8,851 troops in country as of September 7 according to a new report by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
"As planned, by the end of December, the strength of the mission will be reduced to fewer than 5,000 troops," Annan said in his report to the UN Security Council.
"By the end of February 2005, it is expected that the force strength will be 3,250 troops... accompanied by a concomitant reduction of civilian staff."
The drawdown of UN troops has been met with mixed views around Sierra Leone from civilians worried that their own security forces are ill-equipped to handle the potential conflicts that may arise among a population crippled by unemployment and rising prices on staple goods.
Fears of weapons passing over the porous borders with neighbors Guinea and Liberia, itself emerging from 14 years of nearly-uninterrupted war, are also breeding a lack of confidence.
"We are not ready for the UN to go," Gibrile King, who lives in the eastern Kono district, told AFP.
"I don't think we are safe yet."