[This article has been excerpted.]

By Jackson Kanneh

MONROVIA, Nov 1 (Reuter) – The United Nations has suspended relief operations in central Liberia because of rebel activity in defiance of a peace deal signed in August, U.N. officials said…Wednesday.

The World Food Programme said it had halted operations in the region because of sporadic infighting among members of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) on the main highway to his inland headquarters at Gbarnga, 170 km…northeast of Monrovia.

Despite the fighting, donors pledged $145.7 million to support the peace process at a U.N.-sponsored conference in New York last Friday.

WFP officials said U.N. staff had been warned not to travel beyond Konola, where hundreds of African peacekeepers are based.

“We want to continue giving food and humanitarian aid to Liberians in that region, but we are…concerned about the safety of our personnel,” said one official.

He said NPFL gunmen often beat aid workers and seized food and medicine.

“Sometimes they will just start shooting at random just to scare aid workers to leave the food for them. On many occasions, they have broken into warehouses and stolen everything.”

Large numbers of gunmen are concentrated in central Liberia. Aid workers say more than 150,000 people in the region, among them 500 orphans in Gbarnga, depend on relief food and medicine.

U.N. officials told Friday’s pledging conference the ECOMOG West African peacekeeping force needed resources as soon as possible to disarm and demobilise gunmen under the terms of a peace accord signed in Nigeria in August.

U.N. agencies…appealed for $110 million for food and medicine and ECOMOG has put the cost of disarming the country’s estimated 60,000 gunmen at $150 million.

A statement from the U.N. mission…Wednesday said the United States pledged $75 million, $10 million of it for ECOMOG.

It said Britain had pledged $7.7 million in humanitarian and logistical aid, half of which will go towards communications equipment and British advisers for Ghanaian troops in ECOMOG.

France promised $3 million towards disarmament.

The European Commission said $15 million was available…to cover its current health, water, food and security programme, and it planned a second, expanded programme worth $45 million, including $16 million in development aid.

Twelve previous peace accords have failed to hold but this one has the backing of all the country’s faction leaders and the United Nations says hopes are higher for a lasting peace than at any time in more than five years of civil war.

ECOMOG is due to start disarmament this month and elections are scheduled for next August.

Liberia was founded by freed American slaves in 1847. The civil war which started in 1989 has killed over 150,000 people, and displaced half the pre-war population of 2.4 million.

The interim government has said it hopes to put demobilised gunmen to work reviving the rubber plantations and iron ore mines that were once the backbone of the economy.