Nimba Mount, Forest Region. Village of Nzoo, 10 km from Cote d'Ivoire.
Credit: IRIN |
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Talking to inhabitants of Guinea's Forest Region, you will hear that the area's administrative capital, Nzérékoré, is on the point of falling into rebel hands, that the town of Guékédou is under threat from armed groups or that plots are being hatched in Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Liberia to destabilise their country.
For months, the Guinean forest has been alive with rumours and horror stories, all systematically denied by the local authorities, which nevertheless put security forces on full alert.
Since October 21, a curfew was imposed in Guékédou, which had already witnessed bloody rebel incursions that resulted in the flight of part of the population and the departure of certain humanitarian agencies.
Both the local authorities and the Ministry of Interior categorically denied that hostile actions were being prepared across the region's borders with Liberia and Sierra Leone. However, their denials did not do much to reassure people in the region, and an assassination attempt on President Lansana Conte on 19 January 2005, is even less likely to have improved their confidence.
Unidentified attackers fired several shots at Conte's motorcade as the president was driving into the capital, Conakry, from his home village nearby. The president appeared on television a few hours later to say he had escaped unhurt.
Prior to the assassination attempt, instability watchers had been focussing to a large extent on the Forest Region, where hard information is often difficult to come by, and rumours rife.
"Any rumour can get out and the administration must be able to inform the population as quickly as possible before the rumours spread," Guinea's Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation, Kiridi Bangoura, had told IRIN in the latter part of 2004.
The Liberia factor
"There is an objective risk from the direction of Taylor in Liberia and we must be vigilant, verifying systematically all our information," Bangoura said. "Infiltrators coming in must be systematically handed over to the authorities".
Guinea had often accused former Liberian President Charles Taylor of supporting armed groups that crossed over from Liberia in late 2000 and early 2001. Taylor was forced to resign and go into exile in Nigeria in August 2003, paving the way for the signature, one week after his departure, of a peace accord to end 14 years of civil war in Liberia.
However, Taylor loyalists were widely accused of being behind riots that rocked the Liberian capital, Monrovia, in October 2004, leaving 18 people dead, according to the United Nations. The clashes pitted Taylor's ex-combatants against former fighters of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement, just as an eight-month disarmament exercise by UN peacekeepers was drawing to a close.
There were related tensions elsewhere. In Ganta, in the north of Liberia close by the frontier with Guinea, Guineans told IRIN that former Taylor militia fighters were being recruited to fight on the Guinean side of the border. Taylor himself is from the Mano ethnic group, which lives on both sides of the border.
Humanitarian workers and human rights activists in Nzérékoré told IRIN that armed groups had been circulating in the Forest Region of southeastern Guinea for several months. This remote territory, which adjoins Côte d'Ivoire as well as Sierra Leone and Liberia, has proved difficult to control.
This is where many ex-militia men and rebels are ready to use their experiences as bush fighters to stave off boredom and make a living. In January 2005, UN officials in Nzerekore, the capital of the Forest Region, reported hearing gunfire in the town nearly every night.
These fighters, with nothing to do since the Liberian peace accord was signed, threaten stability in the Forest Region, an area already tested by growing poverty and serious ethnic tensions.
Because the frontiers in this corner of West Africa are so porous and ill defined, cutting across ethnic identities, conflicts tend to move from one country into another, bearing severe political, economic, security and humanitarian consequences for millions of people, the UN Office for West Africa explained in a statement in September, on the eve of a meeting to discuss strategies for dealing with persistent insecurity in the region
Refugees remain mobile
The situation is also unstable for the many refugees who come and go between the four camps in the Nzérékoré region and their home villages in Liberia, according to UN officials, who have looked after refugee populations in Guinea for the past 15 years.
Guinean soldier patrols Nzerekore following communal clashes in the city in June 2004.
Credit: IRIN |
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"Refugees go from one camp to another," César Pastor-Ortega, head of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, sub-office in Nzérékoré, told IRIN in October, when there were about 60,000 refugees in the region. "There is a problem, the economic situation is getting worse, and living standards have been affected."
The last major clash in Nzérékoré was in June 2004. It arose out of a dispute between members of the Guerzé ethnic group, the biggest in the Forest Region, and the Konianké, a sub-group of the Mandingo community from the north, who are heavily represented among the LURD ex-combatants.
These conflicts have been going on for decades, feeding off land disputes and political and religious differences. One of the worst episodes occurred during the local elections in 1991, when over 100 people were killed in clashes between the two communities.
The authorities arrested over 200 people in Nzerekore after the troubles in June. According to a government source, most of those held were Koniankés of Liberian origin.
"It is a very simple problem, but because of the deteriorating situation in the country, it could have gotten a lot worse," explained the prefect of Nzérékoré, Algassimou Barry.
A poor and fragile population
For the past two years, the economic situation in Guinea has deteriorated rapidly as a direct consequence of the war in Côte d'Ivoire. With that country divided in two and rebels holding the north, it has become much more difficult for Guinean traders to continue importing basic commodities that used to come across the frontier, which is now officially closed.
The Ivorian crisis has forced about 100,000 Guinean migrants back across the border, many of them traders or farmers who worked on the plantations in the world's biggest cocoa producer and sent part of their earnings back to their families. Not only have these families lost their remittances from the diaspora, they have also had to take on the burden of accommodating the returnees.
"The situation is really catastrophic for the original population," Dr Younoussa Diallo of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) told IRIN in Nzérékoré.
"We are so tired," complained Paul, a waiter at the main hotel in Kissidougou, a town that hosted thousands of refuges from Sierra Leone and Liberia who did not want to live in camps or go back to their countries of origin. "The new arrivals (from Côte d'Ivoire) weigh heavily on us," said Paul. "There is no more work, no rice and there are too many of us."
According to a report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), up to 100,000 Guineans went back to Guinea from Côte d'Ivoire between September 2002 and December 2003, an influx similar in magnitude to the inflow of refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia in recent years.
Pay day for one working Guinean who has returned from Cote d'Ivoire. He earns 500 Guinean Francs or 20 cents labouring for a day in the sun.
Credit: IRIN |
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"There is a very important group of people hidden on the periphery of a humanitarian emergency who do need aid," OCHA said in the report.
While the refugees living in the four official camps around Nzerekore received the full attention of the United Nations and had access to free services - medical care, schooling, food, shelter and protection - local people said they had next to nothing, had to learn to share their land with the refugees, but received little help.
"We have nothing: no school materials, no drugs, no space to accommodate people," said Kékoura, a teacher in a small village on the road to Liberia.
In his classroom, not a single child had a pencil or an exercise book. The tables were empty, the children easily distracted. "This is the year where they are meant to be learning to write," Kékoura said wearily.
Without training and without work, some locals had few hopes for a brighter future and government representatives and humanitarian workers feared they might be radicalised by their lack of hope.
"Looking at the poverty here, it's become possible for everyone to be a mercenary," warned the governor of the region, Colonel Lamine Bangoura.
The United Nations estimated in September that at least 10 per cent of the child-soldiers who fought in Liberia were recruited from neighbouring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire.
Guinea meanwhile recruited young adults and children, which it sent to fight in Liberia and Sierra Leone. According to an official from Guinea's Ministry of Social Affairs, based in Nzérékoré, around 15,000 of them were recruited directly by the Guinean authorities.
"We have identified 67 Guinean children under the age of 18 in Liberian centres (for displaced people)," UNICEF's representative in Conakry, Marcel Rudasingwa, said in October. "If we do nothing, there is the risk they will become delinquents."
According to government officials in the area, many young people, some of them Guerzés, were hastily armed and trained by the government before being sent to fight against Charles Taylor's forces as they tried to break into Guinea in 2000 and 2001.
"What became of them? Where are they?" asked a Ministry of Social Affairs official in Nzerekore, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We have no way of identifying them."
UNICEF has registered some former fighters on condition that they could be given some training and returned to society.
Where are the child soldiers?
Between 6,000 and 7,000 former fighters were enrolled while they were children, according to various sources. By October 2004, local NGOs had tracked down more than 1,500 ex-volunteers, recruited in 2000 and 2001.
According to the Guinean Organisation of Human Rights (OGDH), some of the ex-fighters can be found manning the roadblocks that are thrown up across Nzérékoré after dusk. Officially there to clamp down on banditry, these young men, always heavily armed, are more often interested in extorting money from car drivers.
In recent years, security problems in the Forest Region have come in large part from the presence of these ex-volunteers and Koniankés close to the two rebel movements that fought against Charles Taylor in the latter stages of the Liberian civil war.
Residents in Nzérékoré said that many fighters, above all Liberians, were still in evidence.
"They are all over town, everyone knows it," said a human rights activist based in Nzérékoré. "We know where they live, towards Macenta (the Guinean town which served for a long time as LURD's military headquarters). We know that they still have their weapons and they are supporting their Konianké brothers whenever there are problems between the two communities."
However, he noted - as did traders who crossed the nearby border regularly - that the former rebels had been seen less and less in Nzérékoré, coming in only to exchange vehicles and electrical goods, presumably stolen in Liberia.
Who is a refugee ? Who is a combatant ?
According to diplomatic sources in Conakry, President Conté backed LURD in its offensive against Taylor, and LURD chairman Sekou Conneh lived in Conakry throughout the Liberian conflict.
The Guinean government has denied backing the rebel movement. "There are no LURD elements on Guinean territory; there never have been," said Kiridi Bangoura. "The Forest Region and the country itself are stable, we have done everything to reinforce security."
However, according to a member of the OGDH, whose testimony was backed by both local residents and political officials, the recruitment of combatants could be seen and heard by everyone.
During the war, the Konianké of the Forest Region tended to back the Liberian rebels, with the tacit accord of the Guinean authorities, the diplomatic sources said. On the other hand, most of the Guerzé sympathised with Taylor on ethnic grounds (His Mano group is historically linked to the Guerzé).
"It is like Liberia here," said one Malinké trader. "We don't need to speak English or French to each other: we know who we are, we are all mixed together."
It was also difficult for humanitarian agencies to differentiate between a Liberian refugee and a Liberian already resident in Guinea and between a civilian refugee and a former combatant on the run. "There are combatants who come from Liberia, but we don't know how many are in the camps," explained a UNHCR employee during a refugee registration exercise in June-July.
Violence that broke out in the camps in June and July, which included the looting of a WFP depot, was provoked by fears on the part of some Liberians that they would not receive food rations or assistance to return home.
According to UNHCR estimates issued on 31 July, there were 25 per cent fewer refugees than during the previous registration, in 2002, when 78,717 refugees were living in the camps at Nzérékoré.
Despite the ceasefire and the beginning of a disarmament programme in Liberia in early 2004, many refugees were still going back and forth between their villages of origin and the camps in Guinea, where their children were still in school.
"New survival mechanisms are being put in place, linked to the end of the war and the absence of new perspectives," said a diplomat based in Conakry. "It is now we risk having the most problems."
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