United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, U.S. Committee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 1997 - Guinea, 1 January 1997, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6a8b524.html [accessed 17 September 2023]
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Guinea hosted 650,000 refugees at the end of 1996, including approximately 400,000 from Liberia and 250,000 from Sierra Leone. More refugees were seeking refuge in Guinea than in any other African country at year's end. Approximately 15,000 new refugees arrived during the year. Liberian Refugees Large numbers of Liberian refugees first entered Guinea in late 1989, fleeing civil war in Liberia. Additional refugees have continued to arrive since then. In 1996, UNHCR officials in Guinea braced for a potential influx of up to 100,000 new refugees when Liberia's war intensified. Several thousand ultimately arrived during the year far fewer than expected. The estimated 400,000 Liberians in Guinea at year's end were approximately evenly distributed between the eastern and western zones of the country's Forest region. USCR conducted two assessment visits to the refugee sites during 1996, and participated in a third site visit in conjunction with other NGOs. Some relief workers asserted that thousands of legitimate refugees remained unregistered and therefore received little or no relief assistance. Other sources, however, charged that Liberian registration rolls were inflated. A complete census and re-registration of the refugee population was tentatively planned for late 1996, but did not occur. It was rescheduled for mid-1997. Most Liberians lived in isolated settlements amid the forest, reachable on poor roads that made regular assistance and protection monitoring by UNHCR a logistical challenge. In the eastern Forest zone, for example, refugees were spread among some 40 rural settlements, as well as in private homes and in local towns. Liberia's armed strife spilled into Guinea twice during the year. In March, a raid by a Liberian faction killed some 35 persons and burned scores of refugee homes. An attack in June reportedly caused additional casualties. The Guinean military strengthened its presence in border areas and staged a brief but destructive retaliatory raid into Liberia. Refugees and relief workers told USCR that Liberian combatants regularly visited refugee sites in Guinea and maintained households there, posing a security concern. Other protection problems surfaced during USCR's site visits. Although Guinea's treatment of Liberian refugees was generally hospitable, the government has failed to provide identity cards to the refugee population. Guinean police and military have at times subjected refugees to arbitrary harassment. A USCR site visit in October concluded that UNHCR employed fewer than half the number of field officers needed to cope with the difficult operational logistics at Guinea's far-flung refugee sites. USCR found that UNHCR staff in Guinea suffered serious internal disputes that hampered the agency's operations. Sierra Leonean Refugees Large numbers of Sierra Leonean refugees first arrived in Guinea in 1991, when an insurgency erupted in Sierra Leone. The number of registered Sierra Leonean refugees in Guinea reached nearly 250,000 during 1996, according to UNHCR. Nearly 220,000 of the refugees lived in the western zone of the Forest region, in the area where the borders of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia meet. The area also provided refuge to large numbers of Liberian refugees. More than 30,000 registered Sierra Leonean refugees lived elsewhere, in the Forécariah region of Guinea, southeast of the capital, Conakry. Despite significant progress toward peace in Sierra Leone during 1996, Sierra Leonean refugees continued to arrive in Guinea, especially during the first half of the year. During January through June, nearly 13,000 Sierra Leonean refugees fled to Guinea, according to UNHCR. Fewer refugees were believed to have arrived during the second half of the year. In September, two months prior to the signing of a peace accord in Sierra Leone, USCR visited Sierra Leonean refugees in Guinea to determine their views on repatriation, given the relatively improved security in Sierra Leone. Although most were hopeful about events in their home country, they appeared cautious about repatriation. During 1992-93, when an earlier period of relative calm settled over Sierra Leone, refugees had repatriated from Guinea, only to find the improved security fleeting. During the USCR site visit, Sierra Leonean refugees reported that because of a lack of available arable land in Guinea, some refugees were forced to farm inside Sierra Leone, returning to Guinea at night for safety. An undetermined number of refugees who were farming inside Sierra Leone were reportedly captured and forced to serve as porters for armed bands. In November, USCR issued a report that urged UNHCR to acknowledge that Sierra Leone's army had been a major contributor to violence and displacement in Sierra Leone, and to set reform of the army as a pre-requisite to initiating assisted repatriation to Sierra Leone. USCR also cited the need for a strong UNHCR protection component inside Sierra Leone to monitor the security of returnees. Despite a November peace accord in Sierra Leone, the home areas of most Sierra Leonean refugees remained insecure, and few of the refugees repatriated from Guinea during the last month of the year. Food Assistance The distribution of relief food to Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees has been steeped in controversy for years. Evidence of food diversions and inflated refugee numbers prompted WFP and international food donors, including the United States, to push for a revised distribution system. They argued that many food recipients were capable of supporting themselves without relief. UNHCR, government officials, and some international NGOs resisted food cutbacks, however. They said that the overwhelming majority of refugees needed substantial food aid for nutritional as well as economic reasons, and that WFP was overestimating the number of self-sufficient households. Although the dispute continued in 1996, all parties agreed to begin a new targeted-feeding program in 1996 that slightly reduced the number of food beneficiaries and cracked down on food diversions. Plans called for more stringent changes in 1997 that would effectively cut food assistance to the majority of refugees for most of the year. During 1996, all registered refugees who arrived in Guinea after mid-1994 were eligible for year-round food assistance, as were elderly persons, single-parent households, disabled persons, and other vulnerable groups. Long-time refugees living in Guinea's rural areas received food distributions for several months, during the region's so-called hungry season. Approximately two thirds of all refugees received at least some relief food during the year. Additional restrictions planned for 1997 would reduce the number of food beneficiaries to about one third of the refugee population. To cushion the impact, UNHCR and NGOs intensified their efforts to promote farming and income-generation projects among refugee families. In the eastern zone, UNHCR managed to more than double the amount of land available for rice farming. Less than one third of the refugees in Guinea had access to farm land, however, and some of the land provided for refugee agriculture was of poor quality, a study by Médecins Sans Frontières concluded. Malnutrition temporarily rose to 13 percent at some refugee sites during the lean season, and aid workers observed a rise in prostitution and an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors as refugee households attempted to cope with the food reductions. A new school feeding program for children, planned for 1996, failed to materialize at most locations. Refugees and some aid workers predicted that worse hardships would result under the cutbacks planned for 1997. A USCR report published in late 1996, "USCR Site Visit to Sierra Leone and Guinea," suggested that much-needed improvements in the food distribution system should include safeguards to protect the health of refugees who remained truly dependent on food relief. The report observed that UNHCR programs required additional reforms. "UNHCR should make whatever management changes are necessary to regain the confidence of donors, implementing partners, and UN partner agencies," the report recommended. "For years, UNHCR headquarters in Geneva has paid too little attention and devoted too few resources to the situation in Guinea." USCR urged UNHCR to "place greater emphasis on effective selfsufficiency programs for refugees in Guinea."
