IRIN Focus on Sierra Leonean refugees in Bissau

Insecurity and hostility in southern Guinea have prompted some Sierra Leoneans to flee to Guinea-Bissau where, like other refugees who preceded them, they struggle to survive. Some of the new arrivals live in the Mercado de Bandim, the largest market in Bissau. At night, they sleep in stalls owned by compatriots or people from other West African countries. Come dawn, they roll up their makeshift sleeping mats and the stalls become small shops or chop bars (informal restaurants) once more. Most say fear drove them from Guinea, where insurgents started attacking areas in the south of the country in September. As Guinea’s military counterattacked, refugees were caught in the crossfire. Sarata Kaba, a young woman who lived in the Forecariah area, said two women died when her camp was bombarded late last year. “One was pregnant and the other suffered from hypertension,” she told IRIN. Guinean youths also attacked the camp and beat up refugees until they were stopped by the mayor of Forecariah, she said. Fearing for their lives, the refugees took to the bush. Kaba’s group walked for two days before reaching Conakry. She stayed for a few days outside the Sierra Leone Embassy compound in Conakry, along with many other refugees, but then a group of Guineans stoned them. “They threatened us too much so I made up my mind to leave,” she said. When she heard that people were going to Guinea-Bissau, she decided to follow suit. She arrived in Bissau on 28 February. For some of the Sierra Leoneans, the trek to Guinea-Bissau is the latest in a series of displacements. Margaret Zizer, 40, said she used to work at the electricity corporation in Sierra Leone, then became a trader until the civil war caused her to flee to Guinea. “That was quite some time ago,” she told IRIN. “I came first (to Guinea) then I went back. The heat was strong (the situation was insecure) so I came back again.” In Guinea she worked on a farm and later in a fishing community, However, when last year’s attacks generated hostility against Sierra Leoneans, she took her bother’s advice and travelled with him to Bafata in Guinea-Bissau. They had no money to pay for transport to the capital but a driver whom they told of their plight brought them to Bissau for free. They arrived on 19 March. “Luckily I met one of my ‘sisters’ here,” she said. “We were all in the same neighbourhood in Freetown. So I am staying with her.” “We are sleeping right here,” she said, pointing to the uneven mud floor of a shack no larger than four square metres at the Bandim Market. IRIN met more than 50 Sierra Leoneans at Bandim Market. Another 65 persons have been living in an abandoned seminary in Bor, about 15 km from Bissau. Some of the Bor refugees have been in Guinea-Bissau for years, including their president, Saidu Turay. Turay told IRIN he had been a security officer in a diamond field in Kenema District, eastern Sierra Leone. When rebels attacked the area, he fled first to Guinea then to Guinea-Bissau. In the mid-1990s, he and his wife pooled a lumpsum of 1,500,000 pesos (about US $25) they each received from UNHCR, and set up an informal restaurant. However, civil war broke out in mid-1998, displacing over 300,000 people, the refugees included. “We fled to Prabis,” Turay said. “We lost everything we had.” After the war ended in mid-1999, the refugees received little official help, they say. They staged a hunger strike at the UN liaison office in Bissau in late 1999 and sent letters to various institutions but not much has changed in their situation, although visits to Bor by government and UN officials have resulted in occasional gifts of rice and other supplies. Some of the refugees survive by making and selling handicraft. Others ply trades such as tailoring, but many have no means of livelihood and depend on donations from NGOs such as Caritas and the Adventist relief organisation, ADRA. When IRIN visited Bor in the second half of March, the refugees had drawn up a series of projects covering areas such as farming, textile designing, catering and carpentry, which they hoped to present for funding. The refugees in Bor listed food, shelter and medical care among their main concerns. They were also worried about their children’s future. “We have a lot of children here, but they are not going to school” George Jones, a refugee in his early 40s said. Paradoxically, children from the local primary school follow classes in one of the rooms at the seminary - the classroom they normally used lies on land that has not yet been demined. The refugees also had other concerns. For example, some have no identity documents since they were taken from them in Guinea by security forces and young militiamen. Others received refugee ID documents from UNHCR’s liaison office in Bissau, but many of these certificates are no longer valid. By June, all will have expired. Renewing them could provide difficult: UNHCR closed its liaison office in December 2000. Now the nearest UNHCR office for the Sierra Leoneans is in The Gambia - or back in Guinea. For some refugees, life is not just a fight against deprivation but also a daily struggle against the emotional wounds left by one of Africa’s most brutal rebel wars. Khadiatu Kamara, who appeared to be in her early 40s, said she fled Sierra Leone after Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels killed her husband, father and one of her three children. One young woman narrowly escaped death. Rebels tried to slit her throat but were interrupted and did not finish the job, she said. She still bears the scar. The baby she held in her arms was ill, but she was unable to obtain treatment for her, she said. UNHCR protection assistant Peggy Pentshi-a-Maneng, who visited Bissau earlier this year, said that up to the end of December, there were an estimated 739 Sierra Leoneans in Guinea-Bissau, accounting for just under 10 percent of the 7,587 refugees there, most of them Senegalese. One refugee, a fisherman, said many other people have been arriving by sea on fishing vessels and are scattered in various locations outside of Bissau. There are also 219 Sierra Leoneans in Senegal, according to UNHCR, while The Gambia has 7,631. A source at UNHCR in The Gambia told IRIN that since December 2000, 35 to 40 new Sierra Leoneans had been registered in Basse, one of four areas where refugee camps are located. Asked if she knew of any new arrivals, she said that on the eve of her departure from Bissau, she was introduced to two who had just arrived. Hannes Stegemann, a technical adviser to Caritas, said there were signs that the number of Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees in Guinea-Bissau was increasing. He said he had no figures but new refugees arrived frequently at the Caritas office to ask for help. The newcomers, he said, include Liberians who fled Lofa County in the early 1990s, went back, then fled again in the late 1990s to southern Guinea, before going to Guinea-Bissau following attacks in December 2000 in the Guekedou area. Pentshi-a-Maneng said most of the Sierra Leoneans in Bissau had gone there from Guinea. They received refugee documents from UNHCR because they are under UNHCR’s protection but they cannot receive assistance when there are camps for them elsewhere. “If you feel threatened and you cannot live in the camp then you have to go to UNHCR,” she said. “If you are a refugee in one country, you cannot be a refugee elsewhere,” she added. Destitute though they are, the refugees do not appear to face any immediate threats to their lives in their new-found haven, but no one knows how long that will last. “As long as things remain quiet here they do not risk too much,” a worker with one of the humanitarian organisations working with the refugees told IRIN. “However, when something goes wrong socially, foreigners are usually targeted,” he said, “and the English-speaking refugees are the ones most at risk - the Senegalese usually speak some creole and they are usually in the border area.”