ECOWAS: LOCAL IMPLICATIONS

ABOUT REFUGEES

SIERRA LEONE REFUGEES

As we have already said the Sierra Leonean Civil War was very chaotic and violent, implied a lot of deaths and tortures to the innocent civilians this is the reason that nearly 400,000 Sierra Leoneans were refugees and asylum seekers at the close of 2000.

The biggest part of them fled from rural areas (during 1997-98) as a consequence of the widespread violence. The majority, more or less 300.000, lived in some refugee camps in GuineA which were really unsafe. Others stayed in Liberia and a few went to various West African States or Europe.

About 13,000 new Sierra Leonean refugees went to Guinea during 2000, as a consequence of clashes in RUF rebel areas. Frightened by the rebel infiltration, Guinean government officials briefly attempted to turn back young Sierra Leonean men at the border and limit entry to women, the elderly, and children under age ten.

As many as 40,000 refugees returned home, to Sierra Leone, during the year. The majority returned to Freetown, the capital, and western Sierra Leone because of armed conflict in Guinea and violence against refugees there.

In the last 4 months of the year, 28,000 Sierra Leoneans returned to Freetown by boat. As the UN estimates, an 80% came from camps in Guinea, and 20% were supposed to be Sierra Leoneans who lived in the Guinean capital but were not registered as refugees.

Ending the year, a huge amount of Sierra Leonean refugees had returned without assistance to eastern Sierra Leone from both Liberia and Guinea, according to UN estimates. They mostly settled in Sierra Leone's Kenema area.

The majority of Sierra Leonean refugees who returned could not return safely to their homes in rebel-held areas. Many sought shelter in already overcrowded camps for internally displaced persons. Others lived in villages, hosted by the local community. A small number chose to return to rebel-held areas on their own.

LIBERIAN REFUGEES

The civil war in Liberia caused 1.28 milion of displaced people, half of the population of the country.

The first refugees were from the ethincal group Mano and Gio, since these were the main Taylor’s guerrilla support and they were being torturated and executed. Only a week after the conflict had broken out, 13000 refugees flight to Guinea. By the beginning of 1990, as the war intensified in Nimba and surrounding areas, some 120,000 refugees had fled to Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea. What first had started as a rebellion, now was becoming an ethic massacre. The war increased the differences among ethnic groups, which fought with each other to get revenge. Therefore, there was a drastic raise in diplaced people and refugees, which reached the million, also due to the fact that the war was not only among combatants but a continuous attack to civilian people.

When the war approached to Monrovia, thousands of city residents scape through the Sierra Leonean border, and others escaped to the inland of Liberia. With a few possessions, many of the refugees began the walk to Sierra Leone, which can last for over a month. About 100.000 civilians fled from the surrounding areas of Monrovia into the capital, where the rebels had been pushed out. Many of the displaced moved in with relatives and friends and some resided in camps for displaced people. As a result, the population of Monrovia has more than doubled stemming from the surge of displaced persons looking for security.

Before the end of 1990, the war had left, homes and buildings looted and destroyed, and offices and businesses shut down. Monrovia had no electricity or water services, jobs, or money. Monrovia's residents starved for months as fighting intensified in and around the capital. People couldn’t get treatment because hospitals and clinics remained closed. By November 1990, the number of Liberian internal displaced people and refugees accounted for nearly one-third of the country's population.

Although Liberian civilians needed urgent help, international response and assistance was slow in coming and inadequate. However, emergency food aid finally arrived in the capital beginning in the last quarter of 1990. Thanks to the United Nations World Food Program, the population in Monrovia finally received food items that were distributed by a local organization.

While the aid arrived, Liberian refugees were welcomed by local people in neighboring states who provided them with food, shelter and other basic needs. Rather than live in camps, most of the refugees cohabited with host families who shared their limited resources with the newcomers, even though most of the African families were poor and lacked of resources to support their own families. Also, the host governments adopted asylum policies to take in all these displaced people.

The refugees within Liberia were continually massacred by both sides. For example, 600 people who sought refuge at St Peter’s Lutheran Church and 9,000 uprooted Liberians sheltered in the Baptist-run Ricks Institute were killed, as well as hundreds of displaced refugees in a church serving as a Red Cross shelter. Refugee camps, as it also happens nowadays, were not safe. Liberian displaced persons and refugees in shelters were vulnerable to physical abuse, and were often tortured and massacred.

The table above shows the number of refugees during some periods of the Liberian Civil War. By then, Liberia was one of the countries with more refugees in the world.

ABOUT ENVIROMENT

Liberia

The civil war also had enviromental effects on the country. We are going to focus on wetlands in Liberia, on the basis of the Ramsar Convention, a intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources.

According to the Report on the impact of the Liberian civil crisis on wetlands, the relationship between wetlands and Africa’s inhabitants has always been complicated, given the fact that they see wetlands as a waste land. In rural areas, these swamp lands provided the basic subsistence for its residents. They depended on wetlands because they obtained energy supplies, food, shelter, water, medicine and other ecological services from it. They used pit latrines to dispose their wastes. Even so, they had their own laws regarding wetlands environment management.

When the civil conflict broke out in 1990, a very large number of displaced people moved to the capital city of Monrovia. The capital's population increased from 250,000 people to over a million. Therefore, the city could not hold all these displaced people and therefore they remained in wetland areas in the surroundings. However, these wetlands were not prepared to provide such materials and means of living to that great amount of people. Due to the length of the conflict, most of the displaced tried to carry out business activities there. This caused the use of the wetlands as a dumping site, provoking the contamination of the swamp land.

The main ecological implications of this problem was that sewage disposal was very deficient and could not meet the demands resulted to the growth of the population.

Also due to the proportion of metals contained by the waste materials thrown to the wetlands, rivers had become an unsafe place for swimming and fishing.

Moreover, there was a serious health problem. Agriculture activities carried out near the wetlands contained a big amount of chemicals- some of them banned- and underground waters became infected as a result of the filtration of these substances. In rivers, displaced used dynamite and poison baits to kill fishes, contributing to the pollution of the wetlands.

All theses processes have affected the biodiversity of species, making livelihood music difficult for community dwellers. For example, fishermen in some areas find it difficult to make good catches of fish, which complicates their economic benefits.

What has the government been doing to resolve wetland problems?

In orange, the five Ramsar Sites

Liberia accessed and ratificated in 2003 the Ramsar convention on Wetlands. That meant that the county had access to grants to conduct Post-Conflict Wetland Assessment. Thanks to that, there was the establishment of four wetland areas as Ramsar site.

There was also the creation of a Wetland Committee, which created a subcommittee that had to take care of the achivement of the following policies:

Seek relevant legislations for legislative enactment of the proposed policy. The policy after enactment becomes the tool for addressing the issues of wetland problems in Liberia.
Establish full manegament authority over all Ramsar sites, involving local authorities and expertise in the project.
Integrate wetland issues in national planning process
Seek national mobilization process through national awareness program that aims behavioural change towards wetlands.
Seek international cooperation with neighbours of shared water resouces.