Hundreds return home from Cote d'Ivoire

Guinea has begun an operation to airlift some of its nationals from Cote d'Ivoire, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) office in Conakry and the International Office for Migration (IOM). The flights started on Monday. So far three batches carrying a total of 348 evacuees have returned to Guinea, two on Monday and one on Wednesday, IOM's Zacharie Masse told IRIN in Abidjan. Hundreds of Guineans hoping to get on the flight congregated at the Felix Houphouet Boigny airport in Abidjan on Wednesday, sources said. OCHA-Conakry said a transit centre had been established for the evacuees in the Commune of Matam, Conakry District, while another with a capacity of up to 500 persons was being set up in Dixin, another commune in the same district. Most of the people who arrived on Monday were transported to their final destinations, it added. Water, food and health services at Conakry airport and the transit centre have been provided by the Red Cross movement and the Guinean National Red Cross, which has a standby team of up to 125 trained emergency workers in Conakry. The most pressing needs identified by the government and the Red Cross related to sleeping kits, drinking water, health kits, hot food and land, air and sea transport, OCHA reported. The government also expressed the need to ensure that the needs of these groups were being properly addressed at their final destinations. Guinean government sources indicated that 13,000 people had registered for repatriation by air. According to sources in Abidjan, those who have registered are mainly vulnerable people unable to afford the 13,000 CFA francs (about US $20) per person paid by Guineans who have also been returning home on bus convoys organised by the High Council of Guineans in Cote d'Ivoire. Two busloads of Guineans - 140 persons all told - were scheduled to leave Abidjan for the western town of Man on Wednesday. However, the spokesman of the Ivorian army, Lt-Col Jules Yao Yao said on state radio on Wednesday that fighting had broken out between insurgents and loyalist forces in a location some 50km north of the town. Masse told IRIN some that as at 22 November, 1,242 people had returned to Guinea through the Council. There are about 1.5 million Guineans registered in Cote d'Ivoire, according to information obtained by IOM. However, the total number could be higher. In a situation report for 1-21 November, the UN Children's Fund in Guinea reported that 8,400 Guineans returnees from Cote d'Ivoire had been registered by local authorities on the Guinean side of the border. UNICEF said some returnees had reported that they had been victims of harassment and violence. It said police in the border county of Lola reported that a young woman who had been beaten in Cote d'Ivoire died shortly after arriving in the town of Lola. However, the High Council of Guineans in Cote d'Ivoire said its convoys had gone smoothly and that it had been working in collaboration with the Ivorian security forces so as to make sure that each convoy obtained all the authorisations it needed before setting out for western Cote d'Ivoire, according to Masse. The main reason for the exodus of Guineans and other West Africans from Cote d'Ivoire, where an insurgency began on 19 September, include insecurity and the demolition of shantytowns - whose inhabitants included many migrants. The largest group of returnees are Burkinabe, some 34,000 of whom have gone back home since 19 September, the vast majority on their own. As at 22 November, Burkina Faso's embassy had repatriated 1,850 persons, Niger's 946, Benin's 547 and Ghana's 350, according to information obtained by IOM from the respective embassies.