GANTA, Liberia (AFP) - More than 300 Liberian refugees, many of whom have spent a decade in refugee camps in Guinea, made the trip back over the border as part of a UN effort to repatriate an estimated 340,000 Liberians from around west Africa.
Women, children and elderly people clapped their hands and sang songs of praise along the bumpy road to the border town of Ganta, a 30-minute walk through the forest from southern Guinea and 220 kilometers (130 miles) of hard traveling from the Liberian capital Monrovia.
Trucks of the UN refugee agency UNHCR stopped briefly here before making their way to Gbarnga, the provincial capital of Bong County in the center of Liberia, where they are to stay in a resettlement camp for several days before making their way home.
Most of the returning refugees will have little to welcome them, their houses and fields destroyed and looted in the back-to-back civil wars that raged in Liberia from 1989 until August of last year when a peace deal was signed and former president Charles Taylor fled into exile.
"I am happy to be home," said Martha Kollie, who has spent the last 10 years among 25,000 other refugees in the Laine camp in southern Guinea: "There is no place like home. Here we can go anywhere we want without being suspected of being a rebel."
UNHCR aims to return some 30,000 Liberians from Sierra Leone, Guinea and other neighboring countries before the end of the year in a process considered crucial to ensuring free and fair elections in October of next year.
An estimated 150,000 Liberians remain in camps around Guinea and another 70,000 in urban centers, a UNHCR spokesman in Conakry told AFP.
The agency's resources for the west African state are stretched thin, however, compounded by recent unrest that has sent some 5,000 Ivorians flooding over the border into Liberia.
"If this goes on, there is a big risk of mass displacement of Ivorians and of the Liberian refugees there as well. It is essential that a quick and peaceful solution be found to avoid such a disastrous scenario," UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers said Wednesday.
"At such a difficult and fragile stage in the rehabilitation of Liberia, a large influx of new refugees from Ivory Coast would be very detrimental, creating further poverty and instability."
11/10/2004 - 20:59 GMT - AFP