Refugees set sail for Monrovia in region's largest sea repatriation

Liberian refugees sheltered in Ghana set sail for home and a new life this week in the largest sea repatriation scheme to take place in West Africa under the supervision of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). “I know life back in Liberia will not be easy but it is our home,” said 21-year-old Boye Nyemah, who was only seven the first time he fled Liberia’s civil war 14 years ago. Like many of the 42,000 Liberians officially registered by the UNHCR in Ghana, he eventually returned only to flee a new upsurge of fighting in 2000, when rebels rose up against the-then government of Charles Taylor. On Wednesday he joined 350 other Monrovia-bound Liberian refugees aboard the MV Cerano, a 495,000-ton ship chartered by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) for the largest voluntary repatriation exercise of its kind in the region. “I have acquired computer and accounting skills, which I shall put to use,” Nyemah told IRIN. “We have to go back and work to make life there better. In Ghana, we are just refugees." The three-and-a-half day journey is part of a three-year programme to assist the safe return of those refugees willing to go home that was mapped out between Ghana, Liberia and the UNHCR in September. The UNHCR, which expects some 340,000 Liberian refugees to return home from around the West Africa region over the next three years, 150,000 of them in 2005, said on Tuesday that repatriation was picking up pace since the programme began in October. Cote d’Ivoire joined in the repatriation exercise for the first time this week when 47 Liberians were flown home from Abidjan, the first of 5,000 settled in the main Ivorian city. In western Cote d’Ivoire, 500 Liberians have asked for help to return, but the UNHCR says the majority are from counties not yet declared safe. Although thousands of Liberian refugees have returned spontaneously since a peace accord in August 2003 ended the 14-year conflict, many have run into serious strife. Two unseaworthy ships carrying hundreds of Liberians from Nigeria and Ghana suffered engine failure at sea in August 2003 and in January this year, and their passengers had to be rescued. And more than 200 refugees travelling home overland from Ghana were stranded on the Mali-Guinea border for several weeks because the Guinean authorities refused them entry. UN planes eventually flew them to Monrovia from the Malian capital Bamako in April. More refugees will return if life in Liberia improves The UNHCR in Ghana has already sent about 1,000 Liberian refugees home since October 1, when a first batch of 100 people was flown out of the capital, Accra.

Liberian refugees stand on the dockside waiting for their boat home

"Seven hundred refugees have so far registered with us for the next voluntary repatriations. We also had positive signals from others who will want to go back home should conditions improve in Liberia," UNHCR's Ghana Representative, Thomas Albrecht, told IRIN. "Every Liberian refugee you talk to in Ghana would like to go home. They did not leave their country by choice," he added. Although the UNHCR has registered some 42,000 Liberians at the Gomoa Buduburam Refugee camp, about 35 kilometres from Accra, a large number of Liberian refugees are believed to be living elsewhere in Ghana. But Ghanaian officials deny that the public believes the time has come for the refugees to go. "That is definitely not true,” the chairman of Ghana's Refugee Board, Ninii Akivumi, told IRIN. “I would rather say that Ghanaians are also looking forward to the day when their Liberian brothers and sisters will go home and rebuild their country," Akivumi said the rate of future repatriations would depend on the conditions back in Liberia. "There will be a snowballing effect once those who are going home now send back favourable messages. Then a lot more would like to go back home." In September, Liberia's Minister of Rural Development, CB Jones, said the government had agreed to facilitate the recovery of land and other property left behind and to give recognition to the equivalency of academic and vocational diplomas and certificates obtained by the refugees in Ghana. But some of the returnees on board the MV Cereno were cautious. Prince Koffa Acquaah, a 44-year-old mason who has also fled Liberia twice, left his wife and two children behind in Ghana and will only ask them to join him if conditions back home are good. "We do not know how things are in Liberia,” he told IRIN. “I am going to see if I can gather my father's properties and find a good job. After the elections when everything is peaceful, then I will ask my family to join me." Liberia's transitional government, set up under the terms of the August 2003 peace deal, has been charged with shepherding the country to elections in October 2005.