IDPs begin to move home spontaneously

Anthony Tamba is helping to rebuild his brother’s house on the outskirts of Tubmanburg, a provincial town 60 km north of the capital Monrovia. “We started building in April because peace is here,” explained Tamba after he climbed down from the roof of the new house where he was busily hammering nails to secure the new tin sheets. The roof cost the family US$200 and six months of hard work and savings to buy. Concrete walls will have to wait a while longer. For now, mud will do. Tamba said his family was tired of living in one of the many camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) on the edge of Monrovia, so they decided to start moving home instead of waiting for the launch of the government’s community resettlement programme. The new house is at Kaselli Farm on the Bomi highway, which links Monrovia to the Sierra Leone border. Tamba and his brother make charcoal in the dense bush nearby and sell it by the roadside or for a higher price in the capital Monrovia. The city has been without mains electricity for more than 10 years and for most of its inhabitants, charcoal is the only fuel available for cooking food. The Tamba family fled to VOA camp on the eastern outskirts of Monrovia in 2000, soon after the Liberian United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement launched its campaign to oust the then-president, Charles Taylor. LURD used Tubmanburg, the capital of Bomi County, as a base from which to launch repeated assaults on the capital. Taylor finally stepped down as president and went into exile in August last year, paving the way for a peace agreement that ended 14 years of civil war and has allowed Tamba and thousands like him to cautiously return to their former homes. David Suba, a friend and neighbour who also took refuge in VOA camp, is helping Tamba to build his brother's new house. The two men are working as a team. When Tamba's modest dwelling is completed, they will start building a new house for Suba. They and their families decided to quit the IDP camp because conditions there were terrible and after several months of peace in the country, now patrolled by a force of 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops, it looked for the first time as if they could go home in relative safety. "Glad to be out of the camp" “The children were getting sick in my hands, I’m glad to be out of the camp,” said 41-year-old Hawa, Tamba’s sister-in-law, who has 10 of her own. Hawa’s house is being built first because her shelter on the camp burned down a few weeks ago when a candle fell over causing a fire. They were forced to move in with another family, but it was crowded and impossible. “I’ve come back home. I’ve decided to stay here now,” said Hawa wearily. However, her husband still visits Monrovia to collect the family’s food rations which are distributed regularly at the IDP camp. Without the bulgur wheat, oil and other supplies given out by the World Food Programme (WFP), the family would go hungry. “We eat beans and leaves from the bush,” said Tamba. "But it is not enough." Most farms ended up neglected during the long civil war. Tamba has managed to begin work on his plot, but he will only manage a limited harvest come the end of the rainy season in October. While Tamba and Suba begin the rebuilding work, their own wives and children - they have 11 between them - have stayed in VOA camp. There, they are fed by WFP and the children can go to school. "There are no NGOs [non-governmental organisations] here, they give us nothing,” said Tamba. He and Sumba will send for their families when their houses are finished. Back in Monrovia, at Perry Town IDP camp, next to VOA, Mamie Siryon has just returned from a ‘go-see’ visit to another part of Bomi County to check whether it’s safe to return home with her family. “We want to go home. Everything is going on normally now, everything is finished so we are ready to go,” she told IRIN. Siryon's house in Bomi country was destroyed a couple of years ago during fighting between LURD and Taylor forces, forcing her to flee with her three children to the relative safety of Monrovia. But her husband has died and she has decided to wait for the rainy season to stop before moving back home with the family. Although thousands of IDPs have already abandoned the camps of mud huts and plastic shelters that form a ring round Monrovia, the government and NGO supported National Community Resettlement and Reintegration (NCRR) programme has yet to begin. Refugees can't wait either Thousands of the 350,000 Liberians who fled abroad as refugees to neighbouring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire and other West African countries as far away as Ghana and Nigeria, have also begun the long trek home. They have been unwilling to wait for the UN refugee agency UNHCR to begin its official mass repatriation programme in October once the rains end and Liberia's dirt roads become more possible. UNHCR estimates that about 50,000 refugees have already spontaneously made the journey home since Liberia's three warring factions signed a peace deal in August 2003. For some the journey has been perilous, for many long and arduous. In May, the Don Elvira became the second boat carrying Liberian refugees back from Nigeria and Ghana to require emergency assistance after its engines failed and food and water supplies on board ran out. The journey overland has sometimes proved no less difficult. In February some 350 Liberian refugees, including women and children, were stranded at the Guinea-Mali border for three months because the Guinean government refused entry, citing concerns over security. The UNHCR eventually provided plans to fly them to Monrovia. No date has been set for the start of an official programme to send IDPs home. However, they will only be encouraged to move once the regions they come from have been declared ‘safe for resettlement’ by the Security Assessment Committee for Resettlement (SACR). The SACR is made up of representatives from the transitional government, United Nations agencies and NGOs. Criteria assessed for a region to be considered safe, according to NCRR’s strategy paper, include: · General security: including full deployment of UN peacekeeping forces and the completion of a disarmament programme in the region · Restoration of State Authority: including the reopening of police stations, schools and hospitals · Unhindered access of relief and development agencies: including the presence of UN and other agencies supporting basic needs provision · Assessment of spontaneous returns: sizeable numbers of spontaneous returnees will be taken as a sign that things are returning to normal Returning IDPs will be entitled to a special assistance package. This will include a four-month food ration handed over in two installments, transport home, as well as non-food items such as plastic buckets and basins, to help them set up home and agricultural implements. Surveys carried out in the official IDP camps in Montserrado, Margibi and Bong Counties around Monrovia have verified 260,000 registered IDPs that qualify for the assistance package. But the IDPs don’t only live in camps. “There are people who didn’t go to the camps. We need to make sure that they and the spontaneous returnees are not left out of the support being offered,” said Magnus Wolfe-Murray IDP adviser for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, (OCHA). The NCRR says that support will be provided for such unregistered IDPs through community-based assistance. This will include the distribution of seeds and tools for farming communities and assistance with other unspecified income-generating schemes. Who's paying? However, no-one has yet signed a cheque to pay for all of this. “It is not clear at the moment who is paying for what,” said Wolfe-Murray. “The problem is that we’re rolling out the carpet as we run along it,” he said. There could be great discontent amongst people like Tamba and Suba if they struggle to make their own return home, only to find that by doing so they have forfeited their entitlement to a returnee resettlement package. Others have managed to build a small but steady business within the IDP camps and memories of past injustices keep them fearful of returning home just yet.

Momo Sayo sits at his sewing machine in Perry Town IDP camp

In Perry Town Camp, four tailors work away on their foot-operated sewing machines. The men previously worked together in Bomi County and fled to Monrovia with their families three years ago. Momo Sayo has been a tailor since 1980. He, and his three tailoring friends, carried their heavy sewing machines with them on their heads when they fled to Monrovia. But when they reached Klay Junction, on the outskirts of the capital, Taylor’s gunmen took the machines from them. They have only recently gathered together enough money to buy new sewing machines and Sayo speaks for them all when he explains that the tailors are worried that these too could be looted. “A fighter is always a fighter,” Sayo said, even though most of the LURD gunmen in Tubmanburg have handed in their weapons to UN peacekeepers at a disarmament camp and have been returned to civilian life. And besides, “There is no good business there,” Sayo continued. People are too busy rebuilding houses to be interested in getting new clothes made. But with independence day coming up on the 26 July, Sayo said he and his team have plenty of orders for new clothes in Monrovia. They, at least, have decided to stay put for the time being.