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The recent arrival in Sierra Leone of some 8,000 refugees from neighbouring Liberia has put a "potentially dangerous strain" on war-damaged Sierra Leonean villages along the border, the US Committee for Refugees (USCR) warned in a statement on Friday. The influx, it said, threatened to sidetrack efforts to reintegrate tens of thousands of repatriated Sierra Leonean refugees into their home communities.
A two-person USCR team spent three days in the third week of June in Sierra Leone's eastern border district of Kailahun, where at least 2,000 Liberian refugees had arrived since 16 June, the statement said.
It noted that the same area was already struggling to absorb some 45,000 former Sierra Leonean refugees who had returned home after years of asylum in Guinea and Liberia. Thousands more refugees had entered Sierra Leone farther south, in the Pujehun district, where Refugees International had just concluded an assessment of the growing emergency, it said.
The simultaneous influx of Liberian refugees and Sierra Leonean returnees into Sierra Leone's remote border areas posed an unusual challenge to humanitarian agencies and local residents. Many local people already lacked housing as well as medical, water and other basic services which were destroyed in a civil war that officially ended less than six months ago, it said.
The organisation said staff of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Sierra Leone and other international relief organisations were attempting to implement emergency contingency plans despite serious budgetary constraints.
Among others things, it recommended that UNHCR move more aggressively at the level of its headquarters in Geneva to commit greater staffing and financial resources to the Liberian refugee influx in Sierra Leone.
It also called on the US government and other international donors to support those efforts immediately. "Failure to do so endangers Liberian refugees as well as efforts to stabilise Sierra Leone and its large returnee population at a sensitive time," it said.
The USCR fact-finding team is to continue its assessment in the region through mid-July, the statement added.
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