Some Sierra Leonean refugees in camps in Gueckedou, eastern Guinea, started to return to their home areas at the end of last week, UNHCR quotes its NGO implementing partners in Gueckedou as saying.
“The numbers involved are relatively small,” Daisy Dell, UNHCR’s Deputy Regional Director for West and Central Africa, told IRIN in Abidjan. “It is often a case of family heads checking up on their villages and then going back to Gueckedou.”
UNHCR’s representative in Sierra Leone, Kingsley Amaning, told IRIN he was unable to confirm the reports as UNHCR did not have a presence in the eastern part of Sierra Leone to which the refugees purportedly returned.
There are some 305,000 Sierra Leonean refugees in the Gueckedou area. Many of them fled Sierra Leone at the start of the eight-year civil war.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
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