Aid groups say resettlement of displaced people is too hasty

International and local aid workers are critical of the haste with which displaced Liberians are being resettled, saying the pressure to get as many people as possible back home in time for crunch elections is stacking up problems. Liberia, which is on the long road to reconstruction after 14 years of civil war, is due to hold presidential and parliamentary elections on 11 October. But authorities have banned voting in camps and said all internally displaced people (IDP) must return home to cast their ballot. That, say some aid workers, means that people are being encouraged to go back to their original towns before proper arrangements have been put in place. "The current process is politically driven.... we will be having elections in October and time is very short," said Edward Mulbah, the president of LINNK, an umbrella group of 310 Liberian non-governmental organisations. The Norwegian Refugee Council argued the same point in a report published last month. "There are concerns that the UN's desire for a success story ahead of October 2005 elections in Liberia is the main reason for what is widely seen as a rushed and poorly planned return and reintegration process," said Raymond Johansen, the council's secretary-general. The Norwegian group said that in some of the more remote areas to which Liberian IDPs are returning, the 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping force had little or no presence and so the safety of returnees was a major concern. Another common complaint is that not enough time has been spent coordinating the finer logistical points of getting people home. Olivier Bousquet, the head of the International Organisation for Migration in Liberia, told IRIN that there had been riots last week in the Maimu camps in the central Bong County. People about to leave the camps got angry because there were not enough blankets and cooking utensils to give them before they returned home, nor enough cash to help them cover the cost of getting to their village, he said. "This (rioting) caused us to suspend all our activities and withdraw the field staff from the camps until a proper coordination mechanism is put in place," Bousquet explained. "And this is just one of the problems we experience, always because of the lack of strategy." Returnees frustrated Abraham Bavor, a district commissioner in neighbouring Bomi County painted a similar picture of frustration, this time sparked by promised food rations not being available to those who had returned home.

Some half a million Liberians were displaced when the civil war ended in August 2003

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is supposed to provide the IDPs with a two-month food ration before they leave the camp and a second two-month supply once they arrive home. "Two weeks ago, those of our people that came back to the district went on the rampage," recounted Bavor, who is in charge of the Dewain district. "They stopped all NGO vehicles from passing through the district because their monthly food ration promised by WFP had not been distributed." Even when there is food to eat, other essentials like accommodation pose problems. "Sometimes our people are leaving the camps and are brought here and they cannot even find housing," Bavor told IRIN. "I believe that there must be proper planning for the IDP return." At Wilson Corner, one of the biggest camps on the outskirts of the capital Monrovia, IDP leader Stephen Musa said some people had gone home only to return to the makeshift camps. "IDPs were taken away from here during the return process and they had to come back. They do not have housing. And towns and villages do not have schools, hospitals or clinics," he said. Musa estimated that more than 3,000 of the 15,000 people who had left Wilson Corner had come back, and warned that this was discouraging others from venturing home, both in his camp and elsewhere. Mulbah of NGO umbrella group LINNK sounded the same alarm. "If there is no comprehensive review, I predict that you will have hundreds and thousands of IDPs remaining in their various camps and after the elections you will still have people there," he told IRIN. Around half a million people were displaced within Liberia by the long-running civil war. The Norwegian Refugee Council says about 260,000 ended up in IDP camps. No-one being forced to return, says UN Some IDPs returned home spontaneously before the official resettlement programme kicked off last November. And the acting head of the UN Mission in Liberia, Abou Moussa, said another 122,000 had now been officially registered and taken back to their home towns. Moussa and Liberian government officials deny they are hurrying the process and say that there is a clear framework in place to aid returnees. "We are not forcing people to go back because of elections. The return process is voluntary and we have been encouraging them to return," Moussa said. He said that all aid agencies, including the International Organisation for Migration and the Norwegian Refugee Council, were part of the arrangement and implementation of the return process. Nina McGill, the number two at Liberia's Refugees, Repatriation and Resettlement Commission, agreed. "All of those NGOs are aware that there is a coordination strategy in place," she told IRIN. McGill said that makeshift huts were being demolished once IDPs had been resettled to stop them returning to camps, and that rebuilding a battered health and educational infrastructure in their home towns would take time. "If they say, they cannot go back home because there are not enough schools and health centres, they know very well that even before the civil war not all villages and towns in Liberia had those facilities," she said. "Some IDPs just want to remain in those camps forever and depend on handouts," McGill continued. "But IDPs should return home because there will be a time where there will be no assistance to them in the camps, but rather in their towns and villages." There are certainly some IDPs who agree that life can only move on once they have moved home, no matter what the conditions. "It is better to come home, rebuild what you have, and begin a new life," said Edwin Monger, one of the returnees to Tubmanburg in Bomi County. "That is why some of us brave the situation to leave the camps." But some aid agencies still believe caution must be the watchword, even if that means things move at a slower than desired pace. “The international community, and the UN in particular, must learn that there can be no quick-fix solution to a complex crisis which has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people and destabilised an entire region," said Johansen of the Norwegian refugee council. “Without long-term engagement to find durable political and economic solutions, further conflict and displacement will be the sad and predictable outcome."