Security fears and poor infrastructure will limit repatriation of refugees

Concerns over security in some parts of rural Liberia and the battered state of the country's infrastructure will limit the number of refugees able to return home from neighbouring West African countries later this year, the UN refugee agency UNHCR has warned.

"We do not want a situation where more (refugees) than we planned return because most of them would end up in internally displaced camps since the facilities are not adequate to receive large numbers of people," Golam Abbas, the deputy head of UNHCR in Liberia told IRIN on Tuesday.

He was speaking at the end of a two-day meeting of UNHCR officials from several West African countries to discuss the repatriation refugee programme. This is due to kick off in October, following the end of the rainy season and the end of a UN-supervised disarmament programme.

By the end of this year, UNHCR hopes to bring home 100,000 of the more than 300,000 people who fled Liberia during 14 years of civil war.

But last month, UNHCR said a US$ 23 million shortfall in funding threatened the planned launch.

Most refugees are expected to return overland from neighbouring Guinea, Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, but several thousand are expected to come by ship or plane from countries as far away as Ghana.

Abbas said damaged roads and wrecked bridges meant that Liberia would be unable to cope with a large influx of returning refugees. Housing facilities for them were also limited, he added.

He said some refugees interviewed by UNHCR had also expressed concern over the security situation in parts of rural Liberia where gunmen of the LURD and MODEL rebel movements still hold sway and where the UN-supervised disarmament programme has not yet been completed.

"About 35 percent of those 320,000 refugees that are targeted for the repatriation exercise want to return to Lofa County (in northwestern Liberia) and disarmament has not commenced there yet," Abbas said. "Security is not only of concern to the refugees, but also to UNHCR."

Lofa County lies close to the borders of Sierra Leone and Guinea. It has long served as the headquarters of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement, which waged war against former president Charles Taylor between 1999 and 2003.

UN officials said that although the fighting had stopped in Lofa and a battalion of Pakistani peacekeeping troops was stationed in Voinjama, the main town in the county, LURD fighters still controlled Lofa's diamond mines and most of the rural area.

The head of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), Jacques Klein, said on Wednesday that disarmament would soon start in Voinjama, and areas close to the southeastern border with Cote d'Ivoire where it has not yet begun.

Abbas stressed that returning refugees needed to feel safe.

"It is important to ensure that security situation is conducive in the counties of return so that the returnees would not experience any form of insecurity," he told IRIN.

"UNHCR is not going to force any refugee to return home. This is a voluntary exercise that will start in October and run even until 2007," he added.

The UNHCR official said about 50,000 refugees had already returned spontaneously to Liberia from Guinea, Sierra Leone and other countries in the West Africa, since a peace agreement in August 2003 led the United Nations to send in 15,000 peacekeepers.