Guinean returnees in the Forest Region
Credit: IRIN |
|
As the rain pours down, with his bare feet stuck in the red mud, Abdoulaye Koné talks of his flight from Côte d’Ivoire, of how he and his family ploughed through the bush, their belongings piled in bags on their heads, children carried on their backs. Their final destination was the Guinean frontier village of Nzoo, encircled by the thick forest at the bottom of the highest mountain in West Africa.
But neither the beauty of Mount Nimba nor the richness of the red soil around him means anything to Koné. In the year and a half since he arrived at Nzoo, Koné, like the majority of migrants and Ivorians living in the village, thinks only of how to go back from where he came.
In January 2003, the last of the Ivorian rebel movements to join the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, le Mouvement populaire ivoirien du grand Ouest (MPIGO), backed by mercenaries from Liberia, sowed terror in the forest, attacking thousands of people on the roads, looting villages, killing men and raping women.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that between 75,000 and 100,000 Guinean migrants who were living in the region left for home between September 2002 and December 2003. They have been receiving support and shelter from families living along the border, who already lived in difficult circumstances.
Abdoulaye Koné came from Danané, a strategic town 50 kilometres from Côte d’Ivoire’s border with Guinea. He lived there for ten years, fathering seven children and gaining valuable experience as a mechanic working for international development agencies.
“I lived a long time there, it felt like my home town,” Koné says of Danané. “It was a good period in my life. I earned enough money and life was peaceful”.
Since fleeing into the bush, Koné and his family have had to live in a one-room mud house. The rain pounds down on the corrugated iron roof, making a deafening din. “There are about 15 of us living here”, says Koné. “There are my children, my wife and the family ... there are a lot of people and we have to get along as best we can.”
Koné has not had the chance to find work again. “There are too many of us here. There is no money and there are no jobs”. For him, there is only one way to survive. “I have no choice but to return there”.
From where he now lives, the former mechanic can see the border: a stream running under a small wooden bridge, surrounded by the dense forest. On each side there are military posts, linked by a track.
In their wooden hut, strongly armed, mortars primed, the men from the two armies look the same but there is no interaction. On the Ivorian side these are combatants from the rebel Forces Nouvelles, who have controlled their side of the border since the rebels signed a ceasefire agreement with the Ivorian government two years ago, effectively cutting the country in two.
Captain Paul Sagno, who mans the advance post of Nzoo on the Guinean side of the border, explains that the frontier has been closed since October 2002 and that contacts between the two armies have been reduced to a minimum.
“When they need something to eat we let the cooks come through, but they get their food and go again,” Sagno told IRIN. “There is no question of rebels coming into Guinea.”
Sagno says that it is also for humanitarian reasons that the army lets migrants through, those who lost everything during the war and those who have left their families back in the plantations of the world’s biggest cocoa-producing country.
“The people who pass here will always be going back and forth because they have families on both sides of the frontier. They are all brothers here,” Sagno explains. “Some people even go all the way to Abidjan and then come back.”
Elderly returnee
Credit: IRIN |
|
Foreign nationals in the Ivorian commercial capital, some 600 km to the southeast, have experienced the worst consequences of Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war, which began in the north of the country in September 2002.
Communities in the south, particularly those sympathetic to the government of President Laurent Gbagbo, have accused Côte d’Ivoire’s northern neighbours of being behind the coup attempt at the beginning of the conflict. Northerners and migrant workers from neighbouring countries have sometimes experienced a vicious backlash.
“Abidjan makes me afraid,” says Abdoulaye Koné. “But I don’t have a choice. Liberians stole everything, there is no work here in the bush, no money, this village is too small and life is expensive.”
The worsening economic crisis in Guinea led to an unprecedented rise in the prices of basic necessities. A 50-kilo sack of rice, which would normally feed a family of 10 during two weeks, cost 80,000 Guinean francs (around 30 US dollars), while an average monthly salary was about 20 US dollars.
“What do you do when you have nothing?” asks Koné. “The children are always ill because there isn’t enough food; I can’t find meat and as for medicines ... it’s very difficult”.
Koné explains that he can get down to Abidjan once a month “to help out some of my brothers in their business there. I come back with a little money, but that soon disappears when you have to pay off policemen on the road.”
His wife and children cultivate a small plot of rice loaned from a cousin a few hundred metres from the village. But good soil has become scarce because of the population growth. It is now difficult to find good land and a house to go with it. All along the main highway running through the village you see rows of huts, packed tightly, one against the other.
According to Koné, the chefs de terre, or local chiefs, gave land away before the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire, but following the return of the migrants, people have to pay to cultivate whatever is available.
Local administrators complain of the pressure they are up against. “The population of the village has nearly doubled since September 2002,” the sub-prefect of Nzoo, complains. “The schools are full, we lack food and water and the environment is suffering.”
The sub-prefect explains that there are 960 pupils in the local primary school, which means 65 children in each class. Teachers have no way of finishing the academic year on time.
“How can children be taught to read and write when there are no pencils and no exercise books!” exclaims the sub-prefect.
The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, provides exercise books and pencils to Guinean schools. However, according to a UNICEF official in Nzérékoré, the main administrative centre in Guinea’s Forest Region, schools are difficult to reach because of the lack of infrastructure and are doomed to remain poor.
“Buildings, text books, teachers, all are in short supply,” UNICEF’s representative in Conakry, Marcel Rudasingwa, told IRIN in the latter part of 2004.
According to UNICEF's representative in Nzérékoré, “the Guinean population has no money, they can’t get medicines, uniform, exercise books”. He said also that the returnees from Cote d’Ivoire weighed heavily on their families.
Most of the returnees left their goods behind when they fled Cote d’Ivoire and had no means of employment so, ironically, they now had to depend on relatives to whom they used to send money.
Koné knows Nzoo is not his place and that life in the village has been made difficult by the misery of its inhabitants. “We can’t stay here, there is nothing for us, it would be better to leave,” he says.
[ENDS]
|