Kissidougou, Guinea, near the border with Sierra Leone and Liberia — 24 January 2001
The security situation in southern Guinea is deteriorating, with another reported attack on Tuesday, 23 January, in the border town of Gueckedou, which is just a few kilometres from the Liberian border, and more than 700 kilometres southeast of the capital, Conakry.
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Guinea has described the crisis as the most dramatic situation the agency is facing anywhere in the world.
The UNHCR says a quarter of a million refugees, who had fled into Guinea to avoid other regional conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone, are once again forced to run for their lives. But many are trapped in between the rival warring factions operating in the Gueckedou area, which has been without food supplies for months.
Fighting erupted again in Gueckedou on Tuesday but, as in previous sporadic clashes in the area since last November, it is unclear exactly who is fighting whom. Aid workers reported seeing truckloads of Guinean soldiers heading towards the town to try to flush out the insurgents.
Rebel activity in the border area in recent months has led to tens of thousands of refugees and displaced Guineans seeking shelter and humanitarian aid. A UNHCR spokesman in Guinea, Peter Kessler, said Tuesday that access for relief workers was difficult, dangerous and sometimes impossible, and that in large areas of the border region, law and order has broken down.
Kessler explained that the crisis facing Guinea is three-fold: firstly, serious internal problems, secondly, the threat from across its borders with two neighbours, and thirdly, rebel groups operating in Guinean territories, apparently infiltrating from across the frontiers.
The UNHCR spokesman described it as an "unfortunate situation where the internal security is simply collapsing day by day. It's more insecure in the border regions where the refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia are."
Guinea shares a long and porous 1800 kilometre border with Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, is assembling one thousand six hundred peacekeepers, in a force made up of troops from Nigeria, Niger, Senegal and Mali, to monitor the borders.
But observers say this is an inadequate number for such a vast area, with an ill-defined mandate for the regional monitoring force.
Kessler said the United Nations was especially concerned by a situation where human rights were being violated on a large scale and where some of the border regions in southwest Guinea were sliding closer to chaos each day.
The Guinean government has expressed doubts about what such a small regional peacekeeping operation can achieve; and if they are spread so thinly on the ground, ask the Guineans, what is the point of ECOWAS sending the troops here?
Humanitarian staff once again had to suspend operations in Gueckedou on Tuesday. But Fatoumata Kabba of the UNHCR said their agency was likely to resume work today, Wednesday, as the latest reports from Gueckedou indicated that calm has returned overnight.
She said the town and surrounding areas had bloated in population, going from about one hundred thousand to double that number, following the influx of mainly Sierra Leonean refugees. The peacetime population of Gueckedou town is about thirty thousand.
The refugees and the internally-displaced in Guinea are being housed in about three hundred camps scattered along the borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia. A constant flow of weapons and the hunger for diamonds in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea - a region rich in potential, but dirt poor in reality - has fuelled an increasingly bitter conflict in this part of west Africa. Analysts say the trouble is likely to spread, with raiders, rebels and insurgents invading the areas hosting refugees and crossing back and forth between neighbouring countries.
The men who are holding hundreds of thousands of people virtually at their mercy in Guinea are a mixture of Guinean dissidents, as well as mercenaries from Liberia and Sierra Leone. In some instances, rebels have been fighting across the border in the civil war in Sierra Leone, but with an improvement in the security situation there, it appears some elements have turned mercenary and crossed back into Guinea to fight for disparate factions.
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Fighting for the Guinea government is the regular Guinean army, in a loose alliance with some militia groups that the military is using to enforce security inside Guinea.
Guinea and Liberia have each accused the other of harbouring and arming each other's rebels and dissidents.
But some refugees find the situation in Guinea so horrifying that they are prepared to return home to less than secure locations in Sierra Leone and Liberia. About sixty thousand Sierra Leoneans have made their way from the border areas of Guinea to the capital, Conakry, despite the difficulties of negotiating roadblocks.
On Tuesday, a boat leased by the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, left Conakry port, with a group of Sierra Leonean returnees, heading for Freetown.
Asked if they will find peace on their return to Sierra Leone, they say that if they have to die, somewhere, they would prefer to die at home.
