Buduburam Refugee Camp

 Yesterday I traveled with Women’s Initiative for Self-Empowerment (WISE), a Ghanaian NGO that councils victims of gender based violence, to the Liberian Refugee Camp located about an hour’s drive away from Accra.  WISE is one of the NGOs that are partnered in the project I am working on, and my mission in the camp was to speak with one of their local partners.

 I mistakenly have this conception that every refugee camp will look like those I’ve seen on the news out of Darfur.  The image I have is of open plains littered with makeshift tent encampments sandwiched between communal dining and sanitation compounds.  This camp was nothing like that.  Tin shacks and mud huts sprawled over red sand slopes, one could be forgiven for thinking this was any other urban Ghanaian village. 

             The camp is currently undergoing what the camp manager described as a “crisis”.  Driving into the camp you are greeted by hundreds of women gathered on the dirt by the gate, some holding up placards, others chanting, others sitting peacefully.  The women are protesting the repatriation package that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has proposed.  The Second Liberian Civil War ended about four years ago and UNHCR and the Ghanaian government have made the argument that it’s time, either for the Liberian refugees to return home, or to fully integrate into Ghanaian society.  However, many of the Liberian refugees do not want to return home, looking instead to be resettled in a third country.  Their recent letter to UNHCR states their three claims.

1.     They oppose integration into Ghana. 

2.     Those with a well-founded fear of persecution should be resettled in a third country.

3.     Those who repatriate should be given $1000 US in support to begin their new lives. 

       The problems are many.  These are simply a few.  First, many refugees want to be resettled in the US due to the historical ties (Thousands of freed U.S. slaves settled in Liberia).  The US government, however, has stated that it is no longer accepting refugees from the camp.  Other developed countries have also made that decision, and UNHCR has made it clear that the refugees should not expect resettlement.  Secondly, many still maintain that Liberia is not safe for them and old ethnic conflicts will resurface.  Thirdly, UNHCR has offered a repatriation package valued at about $150 per adult, which the refugees have deemed insufficient. 

The other, perhaps most compelling case that the refugees make is, “what home do I have to return to”?  One of the volunteers at the WISE office, herself a Liberian refugee, lost her parents, her uncle, and her brother in the first of the two civil wars.  She has been out of Liberia for eighteen years, almost half her life spent outside her native country.  The sense of homelessness she conveyed was palpable; for her even the new Liberia will forever be haunted by the ghosts of her family’s killers.   

UNHCR has pulled their staff out of the camp, and the situation is showing no signs that it will be resolved soon.  In the meantime, children have been withdrawn from the camp schools, and the hundreds of women at the camp gate who have not moved for 14 days are determined to continue the protest.  For our sake, the car that we drove to the camp was donated by UNHCR, and thus bore its emblem on the side doors.  As we were leaving the camp, a teenage boy, mistaking us for members of UNHCR, turned sharply to his right, rapped in the side window, and yelled; “I do not want to be a refugee forever”!