War sends floods of migrants back home to bleak future

Mariam’s twisted fingers will forever remain a brutal reminder of her violent escape three years ago to Burkina Faso from Cote d’Ivoire, her home for 25 years until war broke out there in 2002. Millions of people have left impoverished Burkina Faso in past decades in search of work on the thriving cocoa and coffee plantations of Cote d’Ivoire, the region’s economic powerhouse, and at least four million people originally from Burkina Faso and Mali have settled there. But in the last three years, war and ethnic tension have driven hundreds of thousands back home - only to find the future seems bleak in a nation rated the world’s third poorest by the United Nations. Mariam says the scars left by the beatings during her flight home to shelter are nothing compared with the suffering since. For three years now Mariam has survived by sweeping the sand off the streets in a dusty neighbourhood outside Ouagadougou, the capital. With the help of a little extra cash doing the washing for the neighbours, two of her seven children are in school. As for the others, two of whom are at university, “they look after themselves,” she told IRIN. Mariam is one of 366,000 Burkinabe migrant workers officially reckoned to have decided to return home when civil war erupted in Cote d’Ivoire in September 2002, splitting the country in two and unleashing a torrent of spite against migrant workers. Humanitarian aid workers say that as many as a million Burkinabe people may have fled the world’s top cocoa producer. Because they hailed from Cote d’Ivoire’s northern neighbour states, they were quickly stigmatised by President Laurent Gbagbo’s southern-based loyalist camp as supporters of the rebels who control the northern part of the country. “I came home to stay, but there is too much suffering,” said the 47-year-old whose fingers were deformed by blows dealt by security forces on the road running between southern Abidjan, the country’s main city, and Bouake, the rebel headquarter town once the country’s second biggest. Like most of the 700 women who have joined the Teeg-Taaba association for the survival of people repatriated from Cote d’Ivoire, she and her children live on the streets for lack of a home. Her tailor husband, also without a job, remains in Cote d’Ivoire but sends little news. “He’s alive though,” she said. Many other women lost their husbands in the war, said Sabine Nana, an unmarried woman in her 30s committed “to saving my sisters from the misery” left by the Ivorian civil war. “Women were assaulted, beaten up and some were even raped during the journey to their husbands’ villages. They thought they’d find shelter there but instead they were thrown out. Some of the men, who’d lost everything they ever owned, wound up committing suicide,” said Nana. Trauma difficult to heal “The trauma was bad and staying together was the only means we could think of. No one’s come forward to help, we are desperately alone,” she said, adding that more than 2,000 children have been unable to attend school for lack of money since arriving in Burkina Faso. Official sources estimate that around 3.5 million Burkinabes were residents of Cote d’Ivoire in the 1990s, working on farms, in trade and in transport. But Albert Ouedraogo, a lecturer who runs an association set up in 2004 to defend the rights of migrants and returnees - Le Tocsin - said there were no reliable statistics on the number of emigrants. “No one really cares about the diaspora,” he said. “Burkinabe people living abroad don’t have the right to vote and nobody wants them to have it - they might be too independently-minded.”

Landlocked Burkina Faso borders Cote d'Ivoire to the south

Observers and analysts believe on the other hand that persecution against Burkinabe migrants in Cote d’Ivoire helped President Blaise Compaore’s landslide re-election this month, in which he won a mammoth 80.3 percent of the vote after 18 years in office. Angered by the hate campaigns, the 13 million people of Burkina Faso rallied around Compaore as standard-bearer of the nation. “No one can forget that thousands of us have suffered,” Compaore told a group of foreign reporters ahead of the 13 November poll. But Nana said none of the sympathy had translated into real help. “Since we set up the association we haven’t received any cash, women don’t even have mats to sleep on.” Destitute returnees weigh down social structures Ouedraogo too was disheartened by the poor response to the plight of the returnees. “We thought there’d be more consideration, more feeling for people who’d lost everything they had,” he said. “Instead, they’re often made to feel guilty for returning empty-handed.” After being run out of her husband’s village, Mariam gave up on family. “Relatives don’t like it when you’ve got nothing to offer. Solidarity? There’s no such thing.” Because of the lack of work and support, more than half of the returnees - men still young enough to work - have emigrated once again, notably to Cote d’Ivoire, according to officials and aid agencies. “Healthy men have left the women and children behind and returned to the cocoa regions in the Ivorian southwest, but haven’t been able to get to the plantations because of the lack of safety and are hanging out in urban centres,” Ouedraogo said. His Le Tocsin association was behind the state-funded “Baayiri” or “Homeland” Operation, which enabled the return of more than 7,000 people, most of them members of Burkina Faso’s majority Mossi people from the arid central plateau. Felix Sanfo, of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said that many of these returnees, once home, headed instantly for Burkina Faso’s thriving southwest, near Cote d’Ivoire, which before the three-year war was a hive of industry. The area is home to Burkina Faso’s lively cotton industry - the country will be the world’s fifth producer this year - as well as sugar, fruit and vegetables. But its flourmills are closed down for lack of grain imports from Cote d’Ivoire and a once flourishing motorbike plant has slashed production for lack of buyers. So the region now faces “a latent crisis,” according to UN officials, because of increasing demand for the few available jobs and added pressure on available land. “Tensions surfaced in 2003, making cohabitation difficult between outsiders and locals,” Sanfo said. The returnees too added pressure on already limited health services and overcrowded schools, making life even more difficult for the local population, already hard-hit by price increases of basic goods following the war-imposed closure of the trading route between the port city of Abidjan, and the Burkina cities of Bobo Dioulasso and Ouagadougou. Speaking to journalists, Compaore said the southwest was in trouble due to the closure of the border with Cote d’Ivoire but insisted that landlocked Burkina “is in the process of overcoming the crisis.”

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world

Speaking to IRIN, Agriculture Minister Salif Diallo agreed, saying that the negative consequences of the Ivorian conflict on Burkina’s economy would be absorbed by this year’s record grain harvest, due to produce a surplus 1.2 million tonnes that would bring prices down. International observers say that to their surprise, Burkina’s economy has adapted well and swiftly to the Ivorian crisis, with many sectors unaffected by the conflict. “We were expecting the effects to be catastrophic but they have succeeded in adapting flow and trading routes to the new conditions,” redirecting transport to Tema in Ghana, Lome in Togo and Cotonou in Benin, said Helia Mateus, the head of the Economy and Social Affairs section at the European Commission office in Burkina. The prices of palm oil, coffee, oranges and pineapples, now imported from Ghana or Malaysia, have even gone down, according to Burkina traders involved in the informal sector. Transport companies, facing stiffer competition following the return of many operators from Cote d’Ivoire, cut back their profit margins, resulting in cheaper transport and goods, while the authorities for their part simplified administrative paperwork for the private sector, which rarely gets government help, Mateus said. Yet life is far from rosy in this West African nation, holder of the world’s record illiteracy rate for adults. With the monthly minimum wage at 30,000 CFA francs (US $54), and world oil prices on the rise, the flood of returnees has helped cause a rise in the price of land and real estate. “Urban poverty is on the rise, as is corruption, but Burkina continues to be held up as a positive example by the international community,” said Mateus. The commission supports the national budget to the tune of 50 million euros (US $58 million) a year. But few are complaining, and after almost two decades at the helm the head of state continues to rally popular support. “There is a feeling of nationalism in Burkina Faso, the crisis has been managed with responsibility and there is no questioning of policy,” said one international observer who asked not to be identified. And even returnees such as Sabine Nana live on hope, rather than hate. “If we can win what we want for the women and children, that is the possibility of working and going to school we will not depart.”