Airlift of refugees stranded in Mali starts on Saturday

The UN refugee agency UNHCR has said it will start an airlift on Saturday to fly home a group of 229 returning Liberian refugees who have been stranded in Mali since early March. UNHCR said in a statement on Friday the refugees would be flown to Monrovia from the Malian capital Bamako in a series of shuttle flights spread over three days. All of them had been attempting to return home overland from Ghana, but they became stranded on the border between Mali and Guinea after being denied entry to Guinea. The government in Conakry said the flood of Liberians attempting to transit through Guinea on their way home represented a potential threat to national security. UNHCR said the 229 refugees, who had been stuck at the border for six weeks, had already been transported by bus to Bamako. Most of them were women and children, it added. UNHCR spokesman Fernando del Mundo told IRIN by telephone from Geneva that the refugees were in reasonably good health. “They are not in bad shape, as far as I understand,” he said. Since the signing of an August peace deal that brought an end to 14 years of civil war, Liberian refugees have been returning home spontaneously in their thousands. UNHCR plans to begin an official repatriation programme for an estimated 300,000 Liberian refugees spread across West Africa in October. By then, the rainy season will be over, making untarred roads passable once more, and the disarmament Liberia’s three warring factions should have been completed. Many of those who have already returned to Liberia unassisted have been unable to travel back to their home towns and villages due to continuing insecurity in the interior. As a result, temporary camps for the returnees are swelling. According to UNHCR there are nearly 6,000 returned refugees at the Perry Town and Siegbeh camps on the outskirts of Monrovia.