Sinje camps still inaccessible

Sinje camps, near Liberia's border with Sierra Leone, are still inaccessible to humanitarian agencies, sources in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, told IRIN on Thursday. The officer in charge of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Liberia, Felix Gomez, said that hopes of accessing Sinje were further dashed by recent reports of skirmishes in the surrounding areas. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, last week expressed concern about the security of thousands of Sierra Leonean refugees in camps situated near battle lines in Liberia. Apart from a refugee population of 11,000, Sinje I and II camps host about 8,000 internally displaced Liberians, plus an unknown number of local residents, it had said. Humanitarian workers believe that since the start of the recent fighting around the area, several hundreds others have been displaced, "but there is no way to confirm the numbers or the conditions under which they are," Gomez said. Fighting between government troops and rebels of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Development (LURD) intensified in February. The LURD has been fighting to oust President Charles Taylor's government since 1998. The outbreak of fighting in the Sinje area last month, Gomez said, caught WFP in the middle of food distribution to the refugees. "We had planned to distribute food to the IDPs in the camps as soon as we finished that of the refugees. Fighting broke out and we were forced to evacuate our staff. We have not been able to go back yet," he added. The agency has managed to carry out some distributions to some 35,000 displaced people around Monrovia, two-week rations to 28,000 people around Totota, some 50 km north of Monrovia and another two-week rations for about 22,000 people in Ganta in Nimba county, bordering Cote d'Ivoire. A humanitarian source also expressed fear that the ongoing insecurity could impact negatively on the mid-term food security in the country, given that this is the planting season. "According to a recent rapid food assessment by various relief organisations, coping mechanisms of the freshly displaced people were becoming limited," the source told IRIN. "In some places, where the displaced settled for a while, farming tools or seeds given by humanitarian agencies were looted by assailants," the source added. In other areas, land acquisition had proved difficult for the displaced. Due to the insecurity, the IDPs had been unable to go to the forest to forage for food as an alternative, he added. Food security will be adversely affected since fighting has affected the farm belts of the country, he noted, saying "These are the areas that produce the largest amounts of rice which is the country's main staple food." "We cannot talk of people buying imported rice in a country with an 85 percent unemployment rate. People simply don't have money to purchase imported food," he added.