Food aid for Ivorian refugees to be axed at year end

Tough times lie ahead for the 3,000 or so Ivorians just settled at the newly established Kouankan II refugee camp in Guinea’s southeastern forest region. Although the refugees are still busy building their mud-brick houses, donors plan to pull the plug on food aid by year’s end, regardless of political events. “Even if the people stay on, the food aid stays cut. The funding is finished,” said David Baduel, the UN’s World Food Programme representative in Nzerekore, the main town in the lush Guinean region wedged between three of West Africa’s hotspots - Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone. A total 53,000 refugees from regional conflict are currently sheltered in camps in Guinea, all receiving monthly food allocations from WFP. But as the vast majority hail from Liberia, where a new peacetime president took office in January after UN troops restored security, donors purely and simply plan to axe funds for refugees by December, saying it is time to go home. “I agree that the situation for Ivorians is very different’, Baduel added, referring to the continuing conflict in the divided country, “But if we have no money we can’t do anything.”

Bio Konneh, with baby granddaughter, surrounded by her children

Rebel forces seized control of northern Cote d’Ivoire in 2002, and according to recent UN reports, armed fighters continue to rob and terrorise civilians on both sides of a divide monitored by 11,000 peacekeepers from the UN and former colonial power France. “I have heard that they will end the food,” said 39-year-old Bio Konneh, head of a family of seven including a baby granddaughter, and one of the 3,136 Ivorian refugees in the camp. “The war forced us to come here and the war will keep us here, food rations or not,” she added. “Those who are courageous will be okay, those who are not will have trouble.” Konneh fled her home in the main city Abidjan, which is also the seat of President Laurent Gbagbo’s government, in May 2004, following a bloody crackdown on opposition supporters by state security forces and allied militia. “At night they would come and bang on the door with a gun in their hands. They would take money, women were raped and husbands beaten so that they could get at the women to rape them…. The military, too, would come and harass us like that. We had to rely on French soldiers hearing our screams,” said Konneh, who lived alone with her children, making her specially vulnerable. A UN report published at the time said 120 people had been killed by government and pro-government militia after opposition parties tried to stage a banned demonstration that March. Many of the attacks took place “in the dwellings of would-be demonstrators or even innocent civilians targeted by the security forces,” said the report.

Everyone, even the children, help in building their new homes

Konneh, whose family originally was from the north and who lived in the poor Abidjan suburb of Koumassi, decided the best protection she could find for herself and her teenage daughters was to flee the country altogether. Taking buses when she could, and walking when she couldn’t, Konneh brought her family to Guinea. Like most of the other Ivorians at Kouankan II, she previously lived at Nonah camp - a transit camp with only basic facilities where refugees lived in tents - before Kouankan II was set up in November 2005. The camp remains under construction today, with the refugees still busily looking for ways to find some income by farming small plots or vegetable gardens, by trading, or by putting to use the skills they have. One such example is Moriba Sanogo, who is 35 and married, with three children and a fourth on the way. An established tailor in his village north of Duekoue in government controlled western Cote d’Ivoire, Sanogo has managed to scratch together enough money to hire a foot-pedalled sewing machine that enables him to make a few cents, mostly mending and making alterations. But while the extra cash may be helpful, it will never be enough to replace the 2,100 calories of bulgar wheat, oil, sugar and salt that WFP provides for every family member every month. “It takes just 50,000 tonnes of food per month [to feed the Ivorians] – it’s not much. Perhaps something can be done, but officially the funding is over,” said WFP’s Baduel.

Tailor Moriba Sanogo before his sewing machine

Sanogo, hunched over a lady’s smock dress that he is mending for 100 Guinea Francs, or about two cents, remains hopeful. “That food is very important. Without it I don’t know what we will do,” Sanogo says in his makeshift shop beneath a plastic tarpaulin. “It’s not possible for us to go back to Cote d’Ivoire now. It is my home but it is too difficult for us Dioula [northerners] there.” “The UN is our Ma and Pa here. It wouldn’t be right for a Ma and Pa to leave their child like that now, would it?” To read Bio Konneh's story, CLICK HERE