Guinea

During 1999, Guinea hosted about 450,000 refugees, including an estimated 350,000 from Sierra Leone, 100,000 from Liberia, and several thousand from other African countries including nearly 2,000 from neighboring Guinea-Bissau. No other country in Africa hosted more refugees in 1999.

As many as 20,000 new Sierra Leonean refugees arrived in Guinea during the year, while an estimated 5,000 returned home.

Approximately 10,000 Liberian refugees fled to Guinea in 1999. Another 20,000 or more Liberian refugees repatriated.

Refugees from Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone's nine-year civil war has pushed several waves of refugees into Guinea.

The majority of the 350,000 Sierra Leonean refugees who remained in Guinea at the end of 1999 arrived in 1998 to escape widespread atrocities against civilians during a vicious insurgency. Many refugees were severely traumatized. Before they fled to Guinea, approximately 100 survived having their fingers, hands, or limbs chopped off by Sierra Leonean rebels. An unknown number of the women suffered rape.

As warfare continued in Sierra Leone in early 1999, up to 20,000 new refugees fled to Guinea. The majority fled to Forécariah, southeast of the capital, Conakry.

Some 300,000 Sierra Leonean refugees lived in Guinea's Forest Region. The area also contained a large number of Liberian refugees. More than 50,000 Sierra Leonean refugees lived in Forécariah.

Refugee camps in both regions were dangerously close to the border. Following several deadly cross-border raids by Sierra Leonean rebels, Guinean authorities declared a midnight-to-dawn curfew in some areas and announced the closure of the border with Sierra Leone in the Forécariah region. This did not affect movements of refugees back and forth across the border, however.

The Guinean border in Guéckédou, adjacent to rebel-controlled territory in Sierra Leone, was officially closed throughout the year. This did not hinder movements of refugees, however. Some refugees in Guéckédou, for example, crossed into Sierra Leone to search for food or to farm when conditions allowed. In April, Sierra Leonean rebels abducted a group of 13 refugees who crossed the border to gather food.

After Sierra Leonean rebels launched a fatal cross-border attack into Guinea in May, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) began to relocate refugees from camps close to the border to sites farther inland. In Guéckédou, UNHCR temporarily suspended the transfer operation in July because of heavy rains, poor road conditions, and a sudden increase in mortality rates among the refugees who were transferred. Poor planning and inadequate conditions in a UNHCR transfer camp contributed to alarming mortality rates, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which urged UNHCR to halt the operation.

UNHCR transferred more than 14,000 Sierra Leonean refugees away from the border by truck. The transfer operation seemed to reveal that, at some refugee sites, the actual number of refugees living in the camps was half the number originally believed.

Guinean security forces regularly harassed urban refugees and those traveling between refugee areas. In April, following an attack on a Guinean ship, which government officials blamed on Sierra Leonean rebels, Guinean authorities rounded up about 125 Sierra Leonean refugees in Conakry and sent them to a refugee camp in Forécariah.

Despite a July peace and power-sharing agreement in Sierra Leone, conditions were not conducive to organized repatriation in 1999, according to UNHCR. However, as many as 5,000 Sierra Leonean refugees returned home on their own to some parts of the country.

Refugees were extremely skeptical about security in Sierra Leone during a site visit by the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) in September. Most expressed a strong desire to return home once combatants had been disarmed, in accordance with the peace agreement. Some told USCR that they would like to return to Sierra Leone before the planting season in April 2000, providing the precarious peace agreement held.

In a September report, USCR cautioned donors that Sierra Leonean refugees were likely to return home slowly. USCR added that "protection concerns will be at a premium when Sierra Leonean refugees do decide to go home. If UNHCR-Geneva's responseŠis to be on a par with repatriation operations in post-civil war situations in other parts of the world, a minimum of 20 experienced protection officers will be required."

UNHCR resettled 343 Sierra Leonean refugees abroad in 1999, the vast majority to the United States.

No instances of forced refugee return – refoulment – were reported in 1999. However, Guinean authorities returned up to 1,000 Sierra Leonean males whom they suspected of rebel activity, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Some of those expelled might have had legitimate claims to asylum. UNHCR reported in September that its access to detained Sierra Leonean refugees had improved.

Refugees from Liberia

An estimated 20,000 or more Liberian refugees departed Guinea and returned home during 1999 even though nearly 10,000 new refugees from Liberia arrived in Guinea during the year. At year's end, approximately 100,000 Liberian refugees resided in Guinea.

Most Liberian refugees fled to Guinea in the early 1990s to escape Liberia's civil war. Their numbers peaked at 300,000 to 400,000 by the middle of the decade. The end of Liberia's conflict in 1996 opened the door to large-scale repatriation. Some 200,000 or more Liberians have repatriated from Guinea since 1997. Their exact numbers, however, are uncertain because the majority returned to Liberia spontaneously, without assistance from UNHCR.

As the year began, Liberian refugees were living in settlements in Guinea's Forest Region, located north of the border with Liberia, near the Guinean towns of Guéckédou, Macenta, and Nzérékoré.

UNHCR announced during 1999 that it would terminate assistance programs for Liberian refugees at year's end. Refugees who chose not to repatriate were expected to become fully integrated into local Guinean communities after ten years in asylum.

Refugees who repatriated with UNHCR assistance received a one-month supply of food before departing Guinea, plus an additional month of food aid after arriving in Liberia, as well as other benefits. Some 13,000 refugees repatriated with UNHCR assistance during the first eight months of the year.

The return home of Liberian refugees slowed after several security incidents occurred along the Guinea-Liberia border during April-September. In April, about 8,000 new Liberian refugees fled to Guinea to escape armed violence in northern Liberia, a few miles from the Guinea border. In August, a second armed raid occurred in Liberia near the Guinea border, pushing more than 1,000 additional Liberian refugees into Guinea. In September, an attack against a Guinean border village near Macenta – allegedly by raiders from Liberia – left nearly 30 Guineans dead.

Authorities in Guinea and Liberia responded to the security incidents by closing their mutual border. The border remained closed the rest of the year, bringing virtually all repatriation to a halt.

USCR conducted a site visit to Liberian refugee sites in Guinea in October to examine the effects of the region's rising political tensions on refugee repatriation, and the potential for large new refugee influxes into Guinea. USCR published a report of its findings and recommendations in November.

USCR found that some 30,000 Liberian refugees had registered to return home but had not yet done so as of October. Some refugees who had repatriated months earlier came back to Guinea because of security and economic problems in Liberia.

"Closure of the Liberia-Guinea border continues to impede repatriation of Liberian refugees to relatively calm areas of Liberia," USCR reported. USCR acknowledged that Guinean officials had "legitimate security concerns in the border area," but urged Guinean authorities to "re-open their border with Liberia so that voluntary repatriations of Liberian refugees can resume and new Liberian refugees can reach safety in Guinea if necessary." Some observers feared that keeping the border closed amounted to de facto refoulment – the forced return at the border of refugees with a well-founded fear of persecution.

If Guinean officials insisted on keeping the border closed, USCR recommended that they should authorize UNHCR to establish temporary "repatriation corridors" that would allow Liberian refugees to return home across designated border points. Guinean officials did not implement the recommendation before the end of 1999, however.

USCR's interviews with Liberian refugees in Guinea suggested that refugees had numerous reasons for remaining in Guinea. UNHCR confirmed this finding. "Some Liberian refugees remain in asylum primarily for economic or educational reasons rather than security reasons," UNHCR reported in November.

New refugees who arrived in April settled into a temporary border camp with UNHCR assistance. The new refugees complained that food deliveries were irregular and that the camp's large tent dormitories, although clean, offered no privacy. USCR visited the camp in October and reported that the transfer of the new refugees to a safer location farther from the border "should be a priority." UNHCR and the Guinean government agreed on a new camp location late in the year.

Continued instability in Liberia prompted UNHCR to prepare contingency plans in August for a potential influx of up to 150,000 new refugees into Guinea. Although the large influx did not occur, a smaller number of new refugees fled across the closed border to Guinea during August-September. Guinean authorities were slow to welcome the newest wave of Liberian refugees amid rising political tensions between the two countries. USCR interviewed several new refugees who lived a clandestine existence in Guinea for several months without assistance or recognition.

Refugees complained of increased harassment, bribes, confiscation of their identity papers, and arbitrary detention by Guinean security forces as tensions in the border area peaked in September. The harassment intensified discussions between UNHCR and Guinean authorities about the need for giving official identity cards to refugees.

USCR warned that the size of UNHCR's protection staff in Guinea was inadequate given the large number of refugees and their increased protection needs. UNHCR was "unable to respond as needed to charges of worsening harassment against Liberian refugees by police," USCR reported. "The U.S. government and other donors...should increase funding so that UNHCR/Guinea can deploy adequate staff to monitor and assist" refugees.

UNHCR appealed to donors for $24 million to assist and protect refugees in Guinea during the year. Actual funding fell short of that level. The budget shortfall limited the number of teachers at refugee schools and delayed the transfer of some refugees to safer locations away from the border.

Liberian refugees regularly called for better health care, wider agricultural assistance, and continuation of schools for refugee students. After its site visit, USCR urged UNHCR to "push ahead [with] programs that facilitate Liberian refugees' self-sufficiency and local integration." However, plans to integrate thousands of Liberian refugee students into Guinean schools in late 1999 failed. Guinean authorities abruptly cancelled the school integration plan because of rising political tensions and security problems in the border zones where refugees lived. About 50 schools re-opened in late 1999 for 24,000 Liberian refugee students. Officials planned to introduce more French into the coursework as part of a transition to an entirely Guinean curriculum in the fall of 2000.

Many Liberian refugees in Guinea expressed interest in resettling permanently in the United States. USCR urged U.S. officials to provide more resources to UNHCR to interview resettlement candidates and more information to refugees "to help refugees achieve a realistic understanding of limited eligibilities for the U.S. resettlement program." Several observers said that some refugees did not repatriate because they believed that they would receive priority for resettlement to the United States.

Refugee Registration

Guinea hosted more refugees in 1999 than any other country in Africa. The size of the refugee population has long been uncertain because of poor registration procedures, the large numbers of refugees who appeared to live on their own, and traditional movements of people back and forth across borders. A UNHCR registration exercise in 1997, for example, found that the Liberian refugee population in Guinea was one-third smaller than previously believed.

In June, UNHCR released the results of a February census that counted approximately 480,000 Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees registered to receive assistance from international relief agencies. This represented about a 25 percent reduction from the previous year's estimated refugee population. The government of Guinea, however, claimed that many more refugees were present in urban areas. Guinean officials estimated that 1 million refugees lived in the country.

UNHCR-Guinea spent much time and scarce resources screening out fraudulent claims to refugee status following a poorly executed two-week registration process in Guéckédou in February. Aid workers reported that local Guineans attempted to systematically defraud the system. Many vulnerable refugees, such as the elderly or sick, were not registered in February. Most of the French-speaking Guinean students UNHCR hired to register the refugees could not communicate effectively with English-speaking Sierra Leoneans. This further compromised the registration of vulnerable refugees with special needs.

UNHCR worked to redeem the census through a painstaking case-by-case verification, which reduced the numbers of refugees holding multiple registration cards and identified false refugee claims. The verification exercise, however, also identified significant numbers of vulnerable refugees who were not counted in February, according to UNHCR. As a result, official refugee figures remained essentially unchanged and continued to reflect a 25 percent decrease from previously inflated estimates. At year's end, the verification exercise remained incomplete.

In a September report, USCR maintained "the problem cannot be resolved without greater human resources on the ground. Lack of qualified staff to oversee data entry and database management has also contributed to much-criticized delays and errors. The end result is an inadequate assistance program." UNHCR-Guinea subsequently fired one staff member accused of fraudulently manipulating its refugee registration database.

Aid agencies were generally critical of the whole process. Some denounced corruption they witnessed, particularly on the part of Guineans seeking extra benefits from aid intended for genuine refugees. Some aid workers criticized the tactic of interviewing refugee children, in some cases, to uncover their parents' fraud.

At year's end, despite efforts by UNHCR to "regularize" the results of the census, many aid workers believed that refugee figures remained inflated. According to UNHCR-Guinea, 129,000 Liberian and 370,000 Sierra Leonean refugees remained in Guinea at year's end, a total refugee population of 499,000 refugees after verification. Some relief agencies, however, believed that only about 300,000 refugees were in Guinea, including as few as 250,000 Sierra Leoneans and 60,000 Liberians. USCR estimated that about 350,000 Sierra Leonean and 100,000 Liberian refugees remained in Guinea at year's end, bringing the total refugee population to approximately 450,000. This figure, like others, was speculative.

Humanitarian Assistance

Despite occasional complaints of petty harassment by police, the Guinean government was generally hospitable to refugees and provided them school buildings and access to local medical facilities. Health standards were extremely low, however. Medicine was scarce for locals and refugees alike. Health posts often had nothing more than aspirin.

Despite worsening insecurity in border areas, relations between refugees and the local population remained good at many locations. The presence of refugees brought international donor resources to otherwise impoverished rural areas.

Widespread poverty among Guineans occasionally posed a dilemma for aid agencies assisting refugees. During a USCR site visit in September, aid workers explained that they could barely meet minimum standards in the refugee camps without surpassing average living conditions for the local population.

Several international aid agencies supported income-generating activities for refugees such as baking, soap-making, tie-dying, and tailoring. Thousands of refugees received seeds and tools aimed at promoting self-sufficiency. Agriculture remained the principal income-generating activity. Many Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees survived by sharecropping, working as contract laborers, or selling firewood in urban areas.

Up to 2,000 Sierra Leonean refugees who were amputees, survivors of rape, and victims of other serious human rights abuses benefited from counseling and vocational training provided through a $1 million, 18-month "Survivors of Violence" program funded by the U.S. State Department. UNHCR-Guinea lacked the financial and human resources, particularly protection and community service staff, to extend the same benefits to thousands of other traumatized Sierra Leonean refugees who did not meet the criteria for the counseling program.

Another special program, run by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), offered counseling to victims of sexual violence and sought to treat sexually transmitted diseases prevalent among refugees who were survivors of rape. The program ran out of antibiotics mid-year as a result of high demand and lacked sufficient funds to continue. Drugs to treat sexually transmitted disease were generally unavailable in Guinean health clinics and were prohibitively expensive on local markets.

Funding for basic "care and maintenance" operations remained woefully inadequate in 1999. Lack of routine maintenance contributed to poor sanitation conditions in some camps. During USCR's site visit in September, at least two camps had an average of one latrine for every 120 people because so many had fallen into disrepair and could not be used.

Most roads in Guinea's Forest Region are unpaved and in poor condition. International donor support for regular road maintenance in refugee areas created slight improvements during 1999 and facilitated aid deliveries to remote camps during the rainy season. In previous years, some camps went for more than two months without food assistance during the rainy season. Delays in 1999 rarely lasted more than a month.

The World Food Program (WFP) required more than 5,000 tons of international food aid to meet the needs of Guinea's large refugee population. At year's end, WFP's food stocks ran dangerously low. Ongoing debates regarding the size of the refugee population in Guinea, how much food was required, and who should receive assistance contributed to the reluctance of some international donors to fund WFP's large food aid operation.

By most accounts, UNHCR improved its management of refugee programs during 1999 after many years of serious problems. UNHCR operations remained severely under-funded and understaffed in 1999, however. USCR wrote to UNHCR-Geneva in November to express concern that new staffing "posts are needed to address the special needs of the Sierra Leonean refugee population. Priority should be given to posts for a medical coordinator, several senior protection officers, and community service assistants. A minimum of 20 additional field assistants are necessary for the UNHCR sub-office in Guéckédou to begin to establish a presence in the refugee camps," USCR stated.

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