COTE D IVOIRE-LIBERIA: Ivorian refugees start trickling home - UNHCR

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

DAKAR, 29 Nov 2004 (IRIN) - The flood of refugees fleeing Cote d’Ivoire into north-eastern Liberia since early November trickled to a halt for the first time this weekend, with a few even returning home as tension eased, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Monday.

“Today the Cestos river that divides the two West African countries is no longer bustling with canoes carrying Ivorian refugees to Liberia,” UNHCR spokeswoman Francesca Fontanini said in a statement.

“Instead, the population movement has been reversed, with small groups of refugees crossing back to their villages in Cote d’Ivoire,” she added.

UN officials in Cote d'Ivoire confirmed that small groups of refugees had returned home.

A total 10,045 Ivorian refugees have been registered in Nimba county, north-eastern Liberia, by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Liberian National Red Cross Society since the latest round of hostilities erupted between Ivorian government troops and rebels on November 4.

Aid workers have estimated that up to 19,000 people may have crossed the border.

The refugees being assisted by UN agencies are dotted along a 45-km section of the border near the towns of Butuo and Gporplay.

Many refugees are housed in a UNHCR transit center in Butuo, but both UNHCR and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) say it has been extremely difficult to provide food aid and relief items such as soap and blankets to remote areas that are virtually impossible to access by road.

Work has begun to recondition roads to allow trucks to pass through, and UNHCR staff based in the town of Saclepea in north central Liberia, have been making daily visits to remote villages and points along the border “often taking narrow roads to the middle of the jungle,” the statement said.

Liberia is still struggling to recover from 14 years of brutal civil war, and the WFP estimates that nearly a third of its three million people will need food hand-outs in 2005.

The influx of Ivorian refugees consists of people from rural areas of both government and rebel-held areas of western Cote d'Ivoire, where the situation has remained turbulent since West Africa's most prosperous country was split in two by civil war two years in September 2002.

Some of the refugees said they were fleeing across the border for the second time in two years.

The latest round of fighting began when government troops broke an 18-month ceasfire and bombed the rebel-held north.

Despite an easing of tension since then, Moses Okello, the UNHCR representative in Liberia, said his agency “will continue to watch the situation very carefully snd be prepared in the event of any inflow of refugees again from Cote d’Ivoire.”

The UNHCR said the arrival of the refugees had not caused problems with the local population. People were working side-by-side on farms and helping each other with child care.

“Africans are the same people and the Ivorians helped us during the height of the Liberian crisis. Now it is our turn,” it quoted Albert Fanga, the Liberian government superintendent of Butuo as saying.

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