MONROVIA: Liberia's main opposition party, the Congress for Democratic Change, has recognised Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president after disputed polls, its leader announced Sunday.

"We recognize that Madam Sirleaf is the president of Liberia," CDC leader Winston Tubman said a day before her inauguration and after talks with the president late Saturday.

"Since the elections, we have been holding negotiations with the government on how to resolve the disagreement ... and having had fruitful discussions, we feel confident that the CDC will be incorporated in the government," he added.

The CDC was therefore calling off a protest march it had planned for Monday and party officials would attend the investiture ceremony, said Tubman.

"We believe that the country has to move forward and peace and reconciliation have to prevail," he added.

Tubman's CDC had refused to accept Sirleaf's win and his party had pulled out of the November 8 presidential run-off claiming fraud.

That stand-off had developed into a political crisis that observers feared threatened the country's fragile democracy eight years after the end of a 14-year conflict that killed 250,000.

Sirleaf, who won a joint Nobel Peace Prize last year for her work in women's rights, became the first democratically elected female president in Africa in 2005.

Thirty heads of state are expected to attend Monday's ceremony, Foreign Minister Toga McIntosh said earlier this month.