More than 1,200 refugees fleeing fighting in northern Liberia’s Lofa County between government troops and insurgents have arrived in western Cote d’Ivoire in recent weeks, a humanitarian source told IRIN on Monday.
The majority of the newcomers have arrived in Danane, 20 km east of the Liberian border, while the others are farther inland around the town of Guiglo, 500 km west of Abidjan, UNHCR’s representative in Guiglo, Abdoulaye Barry told IRIN.
The refugees have been settled in local communities and have so far received small rations of food and non-food items, Barry said. He added that the UN agency was monitoring the situation in order to better help the newcomers.
Cote d’Ivoire hosted about 400,000 Liberian refugees at the height of that country’s civil war in the 1990s. Their number shrank to about 120,000 following a voluntary repatriation conducted by UNHCR in 1999.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
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