UN says it will begin repatriation of refugees in October

The United Nations will begin the orderly repatriation of more than 300,000 Liberian refugees dispersed in other West African countries in October once the rainy season is over, Abou Moussa, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Liberia, said on Wednesday. Moussa said that would allow time for the disarmament of an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 former combatants to take place beforehand. "They would start coming in an organised fashion from October to March 2005 - early enough for the elections," Moussa told a news conference in Monrovia. The August 2003 peace agreement that ended Liberia’s 14-year civil war provides for elections to be held in October 2005. The UN-supervised disarmament programme is due to resume on Thursday following a false start in December. One aid worker told IRIN it was important that the overland transportation of refugees takes place in the dry season, which runs from October through April, since many roads in Liberia become impassable during the rains. "Road networks in this country are deplorable during the raining season", he said. Moussa’s announcement followed the spontaneous return of thousands of Liberian refugees from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ghana in recent months which the UN refugee agency UNHCR has been gently trying to discourage. Security in the interior has remained fragile since UN peacekeeping troops are only now completing their deployment in the interior, where many indisciplined gunmen still roam the bush. Many of the returning refugees have therefore ended up in camps for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Monrovia. However, Jacques Klein, the head of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), said the United Nations would make a special effort to fly home 356 refugees who have been stranded for several weeks on the border between Mali and Guinea. "We are working with the UNHCR to use one of the aircraft provided by MINUC, the mission in the Congo, to fly to Bamako and pick them up", Klein said. The refugees are mainly women and children who were returning home from Ghana in a 27-vehicle convoy via, Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea. They were denied entry into Guinea in early March after border officials said they posed a threat to national security.