Sierra Leonean refugees return home

Some 26 Sierra Leoneans who had been living in a transit centre in Cote d'Ivoire's commercial capital, Abidjan, were helped to return home on Friday by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). They were among some 50 Sierra Leoneans made homeless by the razing of shanty dwellings in Abidjan following a 19 September mutiny, IOM said in a news release. The Ivorian authorities invoked security concerns for the destruction of the shanties. "All were in a hurry to get back to Sierra Leone where many have relatives. But they all said they would return to work in Cote d'Ivoire once the situation has improved," Serge Dale, IOM's operation officer, said. Each returnee was given a transport grant of 15,000 Leone (about US $7.50), according to IOM, which said the group was received in Freetown by officials from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Sierra Leonean government. In Abidjan, IOM's transit centre in the neighbourhood of Deux Plateaux is providing shelter to some 143 persons - mostly Liberians, Sierra Leoneans, Togolese and Sudanese - made homeless by the burning of shanties. The camp is normally used for processing refugees to be resettled in the United States, IOM said. It established it in June 2001, when the US Immigration and Naturalization Service stopped conducting resettlement interviews in refugee camps in western Cote d'Ivoire. Since then, some 4,901 refugees have passed through the facility.