Stricken Liberian refugee ship towed safely to Abidjan

A battered passenger ferry carrying 340 passengers - mostly Liberian refugees sailing home from Nigeria and Ghana - was towed into the port of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, on Friday night after drifting for two days on the high seas after its engines failed. “They thought they were going to die,” Panos Moumtzis, deputy representative of the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in Cote d'Ivoire, told IRIN by telephone. Moumtzis, who visited the ship earlier in the day to assess the needs of the refugees, said they were in a deplorable state. “They are very thirsty, some are severely dehydrated. I saw four or five women who were so dehydrated they were unable to walk,” Moumtzis said. The ship, the Dona Elvira, left Lagos, Nigeria, on 3 May and stopped in Ghana to pick up more passengers on its way to the Liberian capital Monrovia. It suffered engine failure off the port of San Pedro in western Cote d'Ivoire and was then driven out into the Atlantic by high winds. The vessel was finally rescued by the French warship Le Henaff, which towed it into Abidjan and sent aboard emergency supplies of food and water. Moumtzis said that UNHCR staff had identified 324 of those on board the Dona Elvira as Liberian refugees and holders of UNHCR refugee cards. They had all been living in Nigeria and Ghana, but had chartered the vessel to make their own way back to Liberia, he added. There were also 14 Nigerians, 2 Ghanaians and 22 crew, he added. According to Moumtzis, the ferry was rusty and unsafe for such a journey. There were no lifeboats or life-saving facilities on board and supplies of food and water had run out by the time it was rescued late on Wednesday. “Had the sea conditions been worse the outcome could have been much worse,” he said. Moumtzis described sanitary conditions on board as “appalling”. The boat was crowded with children and babies and the stench of urine and faeces from toilets that had long since stopped working was overpowering. Some passengers had succumbed to diarrhoea. “Serious health issues,” would likely have followed if the ship had been at sea any longer, he said. UNHCR had five buses waiting at the quayside in Abidjan to drive the refugees to an empty transit centre in the Deux Plateau suburb of Abidjan where a hot meal, blankets and medics were waiting. Moumtzis said that once the refugees had recovered from their ordeal, UNHCR planned to fly them to Monrovia. “We are making an exception - a one-off for this group on humanitarian grounds - to oversee the transportation of these refugees to Liberia even though the official UNHCR repatriation programme has not begun yet,” he told IRIN. “We have been talking with the government of Liberia today [Friday] to make arrangements… and tomorrow morning I will make some phone calls to contract a plane,” Moumtzis said. UNHCR have said that though they do not discourage the spontaneous return of refugees to Liberia they cannot yet support an official repatriation programme until the security situation is considered safe enough. October has been proposed for the commencement of such a programme. That would would also coincide with the end of the rainy season, during which many of Liberia’s unsealed roads become impassable. Another Nigerian vessel carrying more than 200 returning Liberian refugees went adrift off eastern Liberia in January and had to be rescued by a Dutch warship attached to the UN peacekeeping force in Liberia.