Life on the run for Ivorian IDPs

By now, all the customers in the tiny makeshift restaurant run by Clementine Yao in the Abidjan suburb of Angre are fully aware that she is one of a million Ivorians displaced within their own country by civil war. Yao has run up so much debt during her life on the run from the frontline that in the past five months customers have repeatedly heard her pleading with creditors: “Pity a person displaced by war!” On the night of 24 October 2002, the sound of gunfire echoed in the rebel-held city of Bouake, where Yao worked as a classroom assistant. She gathered her five children and maid together and fled south to the capital Abidjan to escape. Yao's daughter who lived in the capital had been crying over the telephone for days, urging her mother to escape. “After three days on the road we arrived at my uncle’s at Yopougon, an outlying district of the capital. The next day he asked us to leave.” No return to Bouake The eyes of this tired woman, who is now in her 50's, mist over as she recalls the beginning of a nightmare that has lasted for more than two years. But she has no intention of returning to Bouake. “I have nothing left there, and I don’t think the war’s anywhere near over,” Yao said. Amnesty International estimates that a million people were internally displaced in Cote d’Ivoire after civil war split the country in two in September, 2002. The United Nations reckons that more than 500,000 others who were immigrants to Cote d'Ivoire, have fled over the border to Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea. Many of the IDPs have returned to their homes, but according to a study published this month by CARE International, a total 355,423 people are still refugees in their own land, most of them asylum-seekers from the rebel-held north. “I’m a widow and I didn’t know anyone else in the city, I felt uprooted,” Yao said. Her married daughter found her a two-room flat that she still shares with the six people whom she clothes and feeds. But it has been tough finding the cash to pay the rent and daily meals. When Yao set up a midget business at the foot of her building selling Alloco, an Ivorian dish of fried ripe plantain bananas, the neighbours complained and sent her away. She had to rent a room in a neighbouring building still under construction to keep the business going. But she still can’t pay her debts. Few of Cote d’Ivoire’s internally displaced people, or IDPs, ever lived in organised camps. Like Yao they sought refuge with family or friends. This made it virtually impossible to locate them or provide assistance to them, CARE said in its report. The sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of people in poor crowded neighbourhoods that were already under economic pressure due to the effects of war, further stretched limited resources, the report added. To study or not study CARE said many of the 120,000 IDPs currently crammed into the slums of Abidjan were unemployed, hungry and had no access to school. Like Yao, law student Simon Koffi has never received any aid. He had no relatives in Abidjan and had planned on remaining at home in Bouake and continuing his studies at the university there when war began. “But the rebels began to hound students after FESCI (the main student union) came out in favour of (President Laurent) Gbagbo,” he said. “On 26 December 2002 I decided to go.” Koffi first stayed with an old schoolfriend who was living with his family because he didn’t yet have a job. “He never said anything, but I could tell I was a burden, so I decided the best thing would be to go out and get a job rather than think of continuing my studies.” Koffi has lost three academic years so far but says: “At least I can pay my own rent now.” Yolande Pehe for Marie-Rachel Bile, two students of French literature at Bouake university, are still struggling to continue their courses in Abidjan, but unlike Koffi, they have no money to pay rent. Along with other youngsters, the pair are squatting in damp and abandoned basement rooms on the university campus. Two dollars a week to buy food “We have a sack of rice between us and share 1,000 CFA francs (US $2) a week to buy food, but at least we don’t have to pay for transport to get to university, and we’re not imposing or getting in anyone’s way,” Pehe said. Her friend Bile fled all the way to Liberia to escape the fighting, before coming back through government-held territory to Abidjan. “When I fled from Bouake with my little brother, we went to stay with my uncle at Issia (a town in southwestern Cote d'Ivoire),” Bile said. “But fighting broke out in Daloa, a nearby town. So then we left for Touleupleu, which is our home village. But war chased us out again and finally I went to Liberia, where we have cousins, with my parents.” When Bile heard that Bouake University, where she was enrolled, had reopened on provisional premises in Abidjan, she headed for the capital. ‘The daughter of one of my mother’s friends, who was already looking after my little brother, put me up. She was kind and welcoming at first, but as time went by she changed and we realised she was sick of us. “She sold fish at the port, and we must have been a burden. Then my friend said I could come here and stay with her. Life is difficult but at least we’re not bothering anyone.” Occasionally the students get help from an NGO and Yolande said there were reports of student prostitution. “But I don’t know of any girls who are working as hookers,” she said. According to the CARE report, around 20 percent of IDP households in Abidjan are headed by women and 38 percent of the displaced are under 15 years of age.