Thousands of refugees need food urgently

Some 23,000 refugees at the Nyaedou camp in Guinea are in urgent need of food despite their “fairly good physical condition”, the UNHCR said in Geneva on Wednesday.

It said relief supplies sent to Kissidougou last week would be transferred to Nyaedou, a facility that previously sheltered 15,000 refugees. The site is 15 km north of the Guinean town of Guekedou, hugging Liberia’s northwestern border.

These refugees would, the agency said, not be compelled to move farther north to get aid in Massakoundou and other camps closer to Kissidougou. The Masakoundou camp, eight km west of Kissidougou, was built to house 20,000 refugees. However, it now holds double that number after refugees fled the Guekedou area following a series of rebel attacks in December.

“The crush of refugees is severely straining the camp’s infrastructure,” the UNHCR said.

The government approved on Saturday for UNHCR to build a new site at Sangardo, 30 km northwest of Kissidougou, where the agency plans a facility for 20,000 people.

Camps burnt

A UNHCR assessment team that visited rural Guekedou at the weekend found two camps in the town and Kissidougou, 75 km to the northeast, burnt. The Baladou camp 40 km north of Guekedou that previously held some 6,000 refugees is now empty. The nearby camp at Katkama, with a previous population of 15,000 has only a “few hundred”, the UNHCR said. The majority have fled into the bush, the agency added.

It said some 280,000 Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees were housed in a string or border camps but the fate of many remained unknown since the attacks.

Emergency teams arrive

Emergency teams from UNHCR offices worldwide began arriving over the weekend for deployment to Guinea and Sierra Leone, the agency said on Wednesday. It said the 46 people divided into three teams would join the UNHCR’s current staff in the region in providing protection and aid to tens of thousands of refugees.

Their mission, it added, would be to provide emergency help, to assist with internal relocation of refugees to relatively safe zones in Guinea, and to help refugees wishing to return to Sierra Leone. One of the teams will work in Guinea, another will conduct cross-border operations and the third will be in Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, more refugees have been leaving the Guinean capital, Conakry, for Sierra Leone. At present some 1,7600 are waiting at the UNHCR/MSF transit centre and at the Sierra Leonean Embassy for shipment to Freetown. The refugees are being returned on vessels organized by the UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration.

At least 28,000 refugees have returned to Freetown since September, about 80 percent of them former inmates of the camps in Guekedou and Forecariah, in Western Guinea.