Concord Times (Freetown)
Tanu Jalloh
27 March 2008
Freetown — Outgoing Sierra Leone Ambassador to the republic of Liberia Patrick Foya has come under scathing verbal attacks from remaining refugees in Monrovia for insisting that Sierra Leone, after the brutal 11-year old war, was peaceful.
The ambassador told Concord Times on the phone from Monrovia that some 2,533 refugees have refused to come home even when the former government officially declared the war over in January of 2002.
"I have refused to continue giving money to refugees who said they wanted to celebrate the country's Independence Day in 2006. I had tried to convince them that there was no more war in Sierra Leone. That was probably my offence," he said.
Liberia played host to some 25,000 Sierra Leone refugees until 2004 when the UN refugee agency agreed with the Liberian refugee board to formally close down all refugee camps, prominent among which were Bonjor, Samuka and VOA camps.
Meanwhile, a local newspaper in Freetown of Tuesday March 25 quoted a representative of some 1,000 Sierra Leonean refugees in Monrovia that Ambassador Foya was insensitive to their plights.
The envoy, who has served for five years under former President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah's Sierra Leone Peoples Party government, has however dissociated himself from the allegation stating that he was never contacted on the said claims although they were outrightly baseless and meant to soil his five-year long diplomatic excellence.
"The Liberian government awarded me diplomat of the year 2007. I personally supervised the repatriation of 20,000 refugees since 2003 when I took over as ambassador. Just last month we held a meeting to salvage the plights of the remaining refugees here. We took their photos to see how best the ministry of labour could absorb them into the working class," he stated.
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