This story is a bit confusing. I’ve read several versions of the same story in the refugee resettlement news for the last couple of days and this one is the clearest. It seems that the UN’s chickens have come home to roost. The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) is attempting to repatriate Liberians from camps they have lived in in countries such as Ghana for as long as 20 years.
These are just poor people who have been housed and fed for, in some cases, most of their lives. They don’t face violence if they go home, just poverty, so some 600 women staged a demonstration recently and have been removed from the camp.
ACCRA, Ghana (AFP) – “Ghana is not nice.” That is how Tina Johnson, a 22-year-old Liberian refugee, describes the country that has been her home for around 15 years. “I want to go to Norway or Canada,” she says.
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Like Tina, hundreds of other refugees in Ghana want to be resettled anywhere but Liberia.
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Dissatisfied with plans by the United Nations refugee agency to repatriate them, they recently staged daily demonstrations outside the gates of the main Buduburam Refugee Camp, about 30 minutes’ drive from Ghana’s capital Accra.
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Police intervened Tuesday because of what Nana Obiri Boahene, a minister of state at the interior ministry, described as “anarchic conditions”.
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Under the UN plans, they will be given 100 dollars (65 euros) and sent back to war-torn Liberia to start life all over again. The refugees are demanding 1,000 dollars and resettlement in a third country.
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“I am not very well educated, when I go to Liberia how will I live?” she asks. “In Norway or Canada, at least I will get a chance.
Wouldn’t you think that as long as the UN is taking care of these people, it might at least teach them a useable trade.
As long as the UN keeps running these warehousing-type camps and holding out hope that the excess human population will be moved to the West or Australia or New Zealand, there is no incentive for Africa to solve its own problems.