IOM take over repatriation task

Some 350 Sierra Leonean refugees began their 14-hour boat ride home on Wednesday, ending their recent ordeal in Guinea at the hands of insurgents from their own country, the International Office for Migration said. “The refugees are desperate to return home,” Davide Terzi, IOM team leader in Conakry, said. They are the first among some 20,000 refugees that have asked to go home on the MV Overbeck, which has a maximum capacity of 350 passengers. Some 3,500 refugees are at a crowded transit repatriation facility in the Guinean capital awaiting their voyage home. The IOM, which took charge of the operation on Wednesday, plans four repatriations runs weekly between Conakry and Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital. The IOM is working closely with UNHCR, the International Medical Corps, Médecins Sans Frontières and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). The medical charities are providing health care to the returnees while GTZ takes care of transportation from the transit centre to the port of Conakry, and upon arrival in Freetown. The IOM launched an emergency appeal on 3 January for US $2.2 million to support the effort. So far, it said, it had received $675,000 from the United Kingdom and Denmark. Nearly a decade of conflict in Sierra Leone forced some 328,000 Sierra Leoneans to seek refuge in Guinea. However, as the fighting spilled into Guinea and local resentment grew against the refugees many of them fled once more. In a bid to calm tempers, OAU Secretary-General, Salim Ahmed Salim - on a visit last week to Kissidougou and Guekedou, 500 km east of Conakry, urged the authorities and the people of Guinea to protect the refugees in the sprit of Pan-Africanism and humanity.