UNHCR looks at ways to help refugees, IDPs in the southeast

An initial assessment by a UNHCR security unit indicates that UNHCR would be able to resume activities in the Guekedou area of southeastern Guinea as long as staff returned to Kissidougou, 65 kms away, at the end of each day’s work, the agency said on Saturday. However, in an update on the refugee and IDP situation in Guinea following rebel attacks in December, the agency said it was “still too insecure to re-establish the UNHCR office in Guekedou”. The office was burnt during the rebel attacks, forcing the agency to pull out. The security team, which on Wednesday made its first visit to the border area, reported that refugees in Nongow, Wendekenema and Fangamadou camps - located in a part of Guinea that juts into Sierra Leone - said they wanted to be taken back to Sierra Leone. “Some complained to UNHCR that they had to give camp leaders money in order to be registered as new arrivals,” the agency reported. The teams estimates that the number of people in a refugee camp at Kolomba, in the westernmost part of Guekedou prefecture, had increased by 50 percent to 36,000. UNHCR reported that there were as many as 70,000 Guinean IDPs and 180,000 Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees, many of them “in desperate need of help”, in the Guekedou area.