Displaced Ivorians carefully return home after clashes

Some 3,000 frightened villagers who took refuge in Cote d’Ivoire’s western town of Bangolo after bloody clashes last month, have carefully started to return home amid continued tensions in the volatile cocoa-growing region, aid workers said on Thursday. Up to 400 villagers had returned to their hamlets with the assistance of French troops, but most of the displaced people took refuge with host families or in the emergency hall in Bangolo, 600 km west of the economic capital Abidjan. “Up to 3,000 people from 18 villages around Bangolo took refuge in town after the fighting,” said one official from the Abidjan-based United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Some 400 are back home so far,” he said, adding that French soldiers who monitor the ceasefire between the government and the New Forces since the current crisis that began in September 2002, drove them home. Aid workers said all of the displaced were from the local Guere tribe, who fled the Dieouzon and Kouibly villages following clashes between them and the ‘Dozos’, traditional hunters from the northern part of the country. Some south-based pro-government groups saw Dozos and northerner immigrants as the enemies after the failed September 2002 coup, which has increasingly fractured the country of 16 million along ethnic lines. “It’s like a dominoe effect: one village comes under attack, leading all the villagers around to flee the area, which then inflates the number of displaced, causing more unrest, and so on,” said the OCHA official. Ten people died during the two rounds of fighting that triggered the latest displacements, in April 20 and April 27, local officials told IRIN. French peacekeepers, who in April became part of a UN operation in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI), have started to seize weapons in the area in a bid to improve security, but most of those collected were hunting rifles used by the villagers to kill or defend themselves against bush animals. But despite the "mop up" operations undertaken by peacekeeping forces, most are still wary of returning to their homes in the west, the country’s main cocoa and coffee producing region. “Villagers are too frightening to go back home, and some of them just want to benefit from the care and food relief agencies are providing,” an OCHA official said. Food distribution has now stopped but displaced people still receive free health care offered by Medecine sans Frontieres MSF-Belgium in a Bangolo-based medical center, aid workers said. For two weeks, the International Committee of the Red Cross (IRCC), the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF and MSF-Belgium provided mainly food, shelters and free cares for nearly 3,000 people downtown. “This assistance must be occasional and come within the context of a policy of speedy and safe return to their villages, to avoid the establishment of a spontaneous and precarious transit camp in Bangolo,” OCHA said in a press release this week. Aid agencies called for more security in the unstable region, close to the Liberian border, where the humanitarian situation was described as “still critical”. With the outbreak of civil war in September 2002, the Guere people of western Cote d’Ivoire mainly sided with the government of President Laurent Gbagbo. The rebels, now known collectively as the New Forces, on the other hand drew strong support from the Yakouba people who live in the same area as the Guere, as well as northern and immigrant communities who worked on the cocoa plantations. The so-called ‘Wild West’ has remained one of the most volatile parts of the country even after the signing of a peace deal last January, with fighting sides usually divided along ethnic lines.