IRIN Focus on effort to resolve Guinea refugee crisis

The plight of refugees and displaced persons in Guinea received arguably less international attention than it deserved over the past few months, but that changed, at least for a few days, during last week. For a day or two, television cameras were trained on Guinea where, on 10 February, the newly appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, began a five-nation West African trip that ended eight days later in Mali. His aim was to make sure that refugees enjoyed the protection they needed as solutions were sought to what he described as the world's worst refugee crisis. The areas in southern Guinea where Liberians and Sierra Leoneans had sought refuge from instability at home - some of them for as long as a decade - have become unsafe since September due to incursions by armed groups, believed to include Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels from Sierra Leone and Guinean dissidents. As Guinea's army and allied militias engaged the insurgents, refugees and other civilians were caught in the cross-fire. Many were killed, many more were displaced, while others were isolated, including about 150,000 refugees trapped, along with some 70,000 Guineans, just southwest of the town of Guekedou in an area called the Parrot's Beak. This is a strip of Guinean territory that juts into Sierra Leone near the Liberia border. "When I entered Guinea knowing that so many people needed to go to safer places north of Guekedou and we were preparing to receive them, I heard there were incidents with refugees in which the Guinean army wasn't totally respecting the principles that they let people go freely," Lubbers told a news conference in Abidjan, his fourth stop. The Guinean army sometimes denied refugees free passage and often helped itself to UNHCR relief materials, Lubbers explained. As a result, a main thrust of his discussions with the Guinean authorities was that such incidents must be halted immediately. "I made a new agreement with the government and the army there for close coordination to respect these fundamentals of free access to and free passage of the refugees," he said. Lubbers's next move was to Sierra Leone to ascertain its capacity to receive returning refugees. This capacity, he said, was circumscribed by the fact that, although engaged in a peace process, the country had only secured an "armistice, a truce" but not yet peace. Nevertheless, channels of discussion were opened with the RUF, through the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), to explore President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah's idea to seek a safe corridor for refugees across the Guinean border into the Kambia district of Sierra Leone. To complete the triangle of contacts with key players in the refugee crisis, the UNHCR chief travelled to Liberia and obtained an assurance from President Charles Taylor that he would help ensure refugees' safety - through adherence to the principles of free access and free passage - and condemn "any acts that would obstruct or hinder these principles". Guinea accuses Liberia of backing the RUF and Guinean dissidents against it. Taylor, for his part, claims that Conakry has been supporting Liberia's dissidents. There are some 500,000 refugees in Guinea and, Lubbers said, UNHCR's work is severely limited by financial constraints. "We need more international support and also financial resources," he said. "The international community had really underestimated the scope of the problems. I hope that via the media we will get more international attention for the problems (in order) to get financial resources." Guinea had recently appeared unwilling to continue hosting the refugees since it linked the spread of insurgent activity to their presence. However, Lubbers obtained an assurance from the Guinean authorities that the refugees could stay "as long as needed". UNHCR, he said, plans to complement this assurance with a two-track strategy that seeks to increase possibilities for allowing refugees to return home or stay in Guinea, whichever they choose. Of critical importance to a successful resolution of the humanitarian crisis in Guinea is the planned deployment of some 1,700 troops by the regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to the troubled areas along Guinea's borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia. The peacekeepers are to be provided by Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal. Their deployment was to have been carried out in January but has been delayed because ECOWAS is seeking a strong UN Security Council mandate to embark on the mission. Some of the details of the ECOWAS troops' involvement were discussed during Lubbers' trip to Bamako, where he met President Alpha Konare of Mali, current chairman of ECOWAS, and other regional leaders. "Unlike in the past when ECOWAS made unilateral interventions in regional conflicts and most of the burden was shouldered by regional power, Nigeria, it wants UN commitment this time from the very beginning," Remi Oye, an Abuja-based regional analyst, told IRIN. Lubbers feels the international community has good reason to see the Guinean refugee crisis as a common responsibility. If a durable and sustainable solution is not provided, he argues, it is not unlikely that the ripples of the problem will be felt in the rich countries of the world as refugees seek to move legally or illegally into safer countries. "We are no longer living in an isolated world," he said.