Guineans flee wars to face more problems back home

Guineans who have returned home following instability or persecution in neighbouring countries, are placing a critical strain on the already weak social services of the Region Forestiere, said aid workers and government officials. Amadou Diallo is one of the Guineans who fled western Cote d’Ivoire, where he lived for fifteen years, as soon as fighting erupted between government forces and rebels in January 2003. Now 45-years old, Diallo a mechanic by trade, left the Ivorian town of Guiglo with his seven children to take refuge in Nzoo, a small Guinean hamlet a few kilometres across the lightly controlled border. Stuck in a small wet house, with 10 other family members, he complained about unemployment and soaring food prices that prevent the entire family from covering their essential needs. "We have no jobs here and we're too many," Diallo said. “It's impossible to eat well and to pay the school fees, it's too expensive," he added with a shrug. "The kids? They're always suffering from malaria: they're too weak," said Diallo as he pointed to two old mats on the kitchen floor - the children’s beds. Between 75,000 to over 100,000 Guineans fled Cote d’Ivoire following a rise in anti-foreigner sentiment after a period of civil war between September 2002 and December 2003, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) 2003 survey carried out with the authorities’ help. The stream of returnees continued until December 2003, before slowing down sharply after security was restored by UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone, a UN disarmament programme was launched in Liberia and a fragile cease-fire was reinforced in Cote d’Ivoire, local officials said. Most of the returnees found shelter in tired-out local communities in the thickly wooded part of southern Guinea known as Guinee Forestiere, which includes the prefecture of Nzerekore. In the communities along the border, returnees make up about eight percent of the total population, said OCHA. Of these, 50 percent are children, and their presence is placing particular strain on education services, especially in the smaller villages, they said. The Guinean returnees have little support, less then refugees, though the conditions faced by the two groups have much in common, said OCHA. However, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) can sometimes help returnees and hosted communities with food and equipment for schools and clinics, but the initiatives are timid. While the increased population has put a strain on resources, incomes have also taken a battering as cross border trade has slumped.

500 Guinean Francs or 20 cents for a day's toil

“Before the coup in Cote d’Ivoire, trade between both countries was abundant,” Colonel Lamine Bangoura, the governor of the Region Forestiere, told IRIN. “But now the trade has almost stopped and because we host all these people, we’re short of basic food and livestock,” he added. Areas along the borders experienced close ties to the communities on the other side. Traders and agro-pastoral farmers attended markets on either side of the borders to buy and sell their mainly agricultural goods. Officially the borders are closed, though authorities tolerate a laissez-faire policy for “humanitarian reasons”. “Humanely, we cannot let the population go on suffering,” said the governor Bangoura. “There are unofficial movements of people, even if the borders are officially closed.” Though trade does still go on, the volume is lower and prices of staples such as rice, palm oil or meat, have soared across Guinea. In some areas foodstuffs have increased by as much as 120 percent since September 2002 while incomes have stagnated or declined. In the market in Nzerekore, rice costs 60,000 Guinea Francs (around US$30) for a 50kg sack while the average monthly wage is less than US$20, a local trader told IRIN. But still communities are trying to support the returnees and share what little they have. The trader hosts a family of five who came back to Nzerekore with nothing. They eke out a living labouring in the fields for just 500 Guinean Francs, or US 20 cents a day. “They are dependent on us,” he said. “But we cannot tell you that we’re tired: they are Africans, they’re suffering, they’re our brothers and sisters,” he added with a smile. According to government representative, the Commandant Algassimou Barry, Nzerekore cannot welcome any more people. “The town is stuffed full: our infrastructures were built to host 100,000 inhabitants. At the moment we are five times more than that and we have received no funds from Conakry this year,” he said. “Before conflicts, Nzerekore was a nerve centre for trade in the region, attracting people from abroad,” Commandant Barry said. “But now it’s a place for poverty, the social services and structures don’t work any more.” At the local hospital, officials despair as children weakened with hunger and malnutrition, increasingly die of malaria. “Guinean children don’t eat enough and don’t have a varied enough diet to get better,” a senior official who asked to stay anonymous said. “The families have no money to send them to the hospital and when they do, it’s often too late.” Nearly nine of every 100 children who visited the hospital died this year and officials warned it could only get worse as the hospital has not received any government funding this year. The Guinean government is feeling the squeeze after the World Bank last month joined a long list of donors who have withdrawn financial support to the country over concerns of accountability. “As the State cannot meet needs, we’ll be obliged to make the patients pay and to promote co-financing partnership with local communities,” the hospital official said. “We can cure the poorest but not all of them: we still have to buy the medicines and pay the nursing staff.” Government officials warned that is not just hospitals that are suffering.

The first aid room in the main Nzerekore hospital

“We’re dying at the hospital, schools are not equipped with material or teacher capacity and the students cram into rooms full to bursting,” an official at the regional social services told IRIN under conditions of anonymity. In the Beyla region, north of Nzerekore, where some 40,000 returnees from Cote d’Ivoire integrated with difficulty with the hosted communities, things are even worse. “I am a civil servant with no financial and technical means to assess the situation or to help them confront the situation,” he said. Local government officials are worried that frustrations and misery could erupt into violence especially as some of the returnees and urban refugees were combatants from neighbouring wars. Officials and aid workers noted that the security has been reinforced in town, but the situation remained fragile with armed young men mounting roadblocks in the night. “From one day to the next, the situation can explode and Guinea could fall over,” the governor, a former army officer, said. “We should be extremely careful.”