Agreement signed for repatriation of Liberian refugees in Ghana

The government of Ghana signed an agreement with Liberia and the UN refugee agency UNHCR on Wednesday for the progressive repatriation of 42,000 Liberian refugees who have been living in the country for up to 14 years. UNHCR officials said the repatriation programme would begin by air and sea on 1 October and extend over a period of up to two years, but they stressed that the operation would be purely voluntary. Thousands of Liberian refugees in Ghana have already returned home spontaneously since a peace agreement in August 2003 ended 14 years of civil war in the country. However, many have run into problems along the way. Two unseaworthy ships carrying several hundred Liberian refugees home from Nigeria and Ghana suffered engine failure at sea in August 2003 and again in January this year and their passengers had to be rescued. And more than 200 refugees travelling home overland from Ghana in a convoy of vehicles were stranded on the border between Mali and Guinea for several weeks because the Guinean authorities refused them entry. UN planes eventually flew them to Monrovia from the Malian capital Bamako in April. The first batch of Liberian refugees arrived in Ghana in 1990, shortly after the outbreak of the country's civil war. Few were willing to go back home after the intervention of a West African peacekeeping force brought about a temporary peace in 1997 that allowed the holding of elections which brought the warlord Charles Taylor to power as president. Only 4,000 of the 14,000 people targeted in that operation were actually persuaded to return to Liberia. The country soon collapsed into civil war as Taylor's opponents once more took up arms against him. The Ghana Refugee Board said many who left Ghana then soon returned, citing insecurity and a lack of employment opportunities in Liberia. However, greater optimism followed last year's peace agreement which was made possible by Taylor's resignation as president and his departure to exile in Nigeria. Ghana's Interior Minister, Hackman Owusu-Agyemang, said at the signing of Wednesday's repatriation agreement: "The signing is the recognition of the stability and peace in the country and I hope the Transitional Government will keep faith with the people." He stressed that Liberia's broad-based transitional government had to put in place a workable plan to ensure that the refugees do not return to their host countries as happened previously. Liberia's Minister of Rural Development, CB Jones, said in reply that the former warring parties would have to cooperate to make the refugees' return home a success. "For the process to work to perfection every party to the peace agreement must complement its efforts to ensure that all share in the peace," he said. Jones said the Liberian Government had agreed to facilitate the recovery of land and other property left behind and to give recognition to the equivalency of academic and vocational diplomas and certificates obtained by the refugees in Ghana. The United Nations reckons that about 350,000 Liberians fled as refugees to other West African countries, mainly to neighbouring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire during the civil war. However, UN officials in the Liberian capital Monrovia estimate that about 50,000 have already returned spontaneously without waiting for the UNHCR's organised repatriation programme to start in October. The repatriation programme will begin 30 days before the disarmament of Liberia's three armed factions has been completed and aims to bring home 50,000 refugees by the end of this year. The UNHCR has so far declared four of Liberia's 15 counties safe for refugees and internally displaced people to return to. UNHCR officials said Liberian refugees returning from Ghana by air will be allowed to take 30 kg of luggage with them. Those travelling by boat would be allowed to take 50 kg, they added.