Fears of reprisals against refugees

Humanitarian workers in Guinea said Friday that recent cross-border attacks from Liberia and Sierra Leone are endangering nearly 500,000 refugees from those two countries.

After Wednesday’s attack on the town of Pamalap, on the border of Sierra Leone, Guinean troops encircled a refugee camp about 13 km away to prevent retaliatory attacks by Guinean civilians, Chris Ache, the resident representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Conakry told IRIN on Friday.

Suspected Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels killed at least 27 people in the raid on Pamalap, said Ache, who visited the village on Thursday. “All the shops are looted, some homes were burned down. It was completely deserted. Only the army was there,” he said.

The assault was the third cross-border attack in a week. The other two were conducted by armed men crossing from Liberia. Of the refugees in Guinea, 126,000 are Liberian and 344,000 are Sierra Leonean. Eight Liberian refugees are being questioned in connection with an attack on 1 September on the village of Massadou. They were accused of facilitating the raid.

“It could be very dangerous to us to ensure the protection of that camp” near Massadou, Ache said. “We are following it very carefully. We are very concerned.”

Angry Guineans have stormed the Conakry homes of Liberians and Sierra Leoneans in search of weapons over the past week and authorities are trying to prevent demonstrations to call for the expulsion of the refugees. Ache said Guinea wanted more support from the international community. “We want them to look at the security of Guinea in assuring that the government keeps the doors open for new asylum seekers, which is not the case at the moment,” he said.

The Pamalap attack appears to have pushed the border crisis to another level. “There are general fears of people getting through and slipping into the capital. It’s not an easy period,” one humanitarian source told IRIN. “Things could very quickly deteriorate. That is the reality here in Guinea. There are probably indications that this has been a bit more serious than it has in the past.”