Accra — The newly-appointed United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, arrived over the weekend in Guinea to assess the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees who are trapped by border fighting involving neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone in southwest Guinea.
Lubbers, a former Dutch prime minister, has been meeting the authorities in the Guinean capital, Conakry, to appeal for improved regional security to protect the refugees as well as the internally displaced Guineans. The UNHCR head called for a safety and security corridor, which would allow vulnerable refugees to leave and humanitarian workers to help them to do.
On Saturday, Lubbers issued a blunt warning to West African leaders, admonishing them to settle their differences if they wanted to resolve what he described in Guinea as the worst refugee crisis in the world.
The conflict in Guinea appears to be fuelled by the intransigence and political interests of some regional leaders, and their associates and armed militia, who are fighting for the control of lucrative diamond mines and other rich pickings in Guinea.
Lubbers traveled south on Sunday, where the UNHCR says an estimated quarter of a million people are cut off from international aid, including food rations, because of the fighting in the border area with Liberia and Sierra Leone
Last week, at least forty thousand people fled a fresh flare-up of fighting in the embattled border town of Gueckedou, between Guinean army troops and their allies and a large number of rebels opposed to the government in Conakry.
The military authorities in Guinea claimed much of the town had been reduced to rubble during four days of fighting during which the Guinean army used helicopter gunships to try to flush out the rebels, who Guinea says are supported by Liberia. Gueckedou has been described as a ghost town.
Guinea is now seriously threatened with the same kind of civil war that devastated first Liberia, then Sierra Leone, in the 1990s, crippling their economies and leaving both countries politically unstable and geographically insecure and prone to recurrent armed attacks.
Caught in the middle, and literally in the crossfire, are the refugees and Guinean civilians.
Refugees in Guinea from the conflicts across the borders are desperate to go home, again forced to flee another potential regional war which has sucked in the three neighbouring countries.
Last month, after an earlier violent eruption in the border area, dozens of panicky and terrified Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees told AllAfrica.com that they no longer wanted to stay in Guinea - even in new, safer camps -- for whatever reason and implored the UNHCR to repatriate them immediately.
On Friday the UNHCR loaded some of the most vulnerable refugees into trucks and began moving them north, away from Nyaedou Camp which is 15km from Gueckedou and the volatile borders, to new camps 200km away. Some had already left the frontier region for their own safety.
Many other refugees fled to Kissidougou, about 70km from Nyaedou, where the UN agency has its regional base and is trying to cope with more than thirty thousand civilians after the reports of renewed fighting. Traumatized refugees again reported hearing artillery explosions and gunfire on Sunday.
Sierra Leoneans and Liberians stranded in Guinea have complained that the evacuation and rescue effort were too slow and too late.
Lubbers has pledged to continue evacuating refugees from the battle zone, but told the BBC on Sunday that the problem was "all about security". The UNHCR chief said it was the responsibility of regional governments and the international community to end the fighting in Guinea.
Lubbers said it seemed the international community considered Guinea "a small problem", because of limited television and radio coverage. "When I had a conversation recently with President (Romano) Prodi, of the European Commission, and I mentioned the total number of refugees here - many hundreds of thousands - he was totally surprised" said Lubbers.
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The head of the UNHCR lamented that the resources and funds from donor countries came mainly from the west, which was "more sensitive when it is about European refugees, to put it a little bit bluntly". He said he regretted the perception that one hundred thousand refugees in the former Yugoslavia meant a lot, while "a hundred here in West Africa are not important".
Lubbers said one of the reasons for his visit to Guinea was to make an assessment, heighten international awareness of the situation, report back and encourage donors to do more.
On his first foreign mission since he took up his post as the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees, Lubbers is also expected to visit neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia after his trip to Guinea.
