The arrival of nearly 30 000 Liberian refugees in Tabou over the past two months has sent food prices soaring and triggered a health crisis in this small border town in Cote d’Ivoire.
Its water supply system and unreliable electricity generator can no longer keep pace with demand from a local population that has increased nearly four-fold. Staff at the local hospital, which receives piped water for just half an hour every two days, have been struggling to cope with a surge in cases of diarrhea, vomiting and malaria.
Meanwhile distrust is growing between the Liberian refugees and their Ivorian hosts, even though they are mostly from the same Krahn tribe. This growing rift is due to the grim reputation of the Liberian mercenaries who have been fighting on both sides in Cote d’Ivoire’s own civil war further inland. Unpaid and undisciplined, these gunmen have raped, murdered and looted in every village they have been through.
Ivorian troops have withdrawn from the wide Cavally river, which forms the border with Liberia, 30 km to the west of Tabou. But in their place, groups of local youths armed with machetes and a few automatic rifles, who call themselves “warriors” search and control all those who try to slip across by canoe. Many are obliged to turn back.
A group of relief agencies, led by the UN refugee agency UNHCR, visited Tabou at the end of last week to assess the emerging humanitarian crisis. Its aim was to devise a strategy for defusing tension in the region and for keeping local people and refugees alike well fed and healthy.
Panos Mountzis, the acting head of UNHCR in Cote d’Ivoire, led the mission to this small seaside town 400 km west of Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital Abidjan. “We need to advoid the growing unemployment among young people here from adding to the tension which exists between the local population and the refugees,” he said.
One such project involves getting refugees and local people to work together in cultivating cassava and other food crops. Other relief efforts are already under way.
Refugees began flooding across the Cavally river to Tabou in early May as the rebel Movement for Democracy in Liberia (Model) made sweeping gains in southeastern Liberia and captured the nearby port of Harper.
According to the UNHCR, there at least 27 000 refugees living in Tabou and the surrounding district and perhaps more than 29 000. Most of these are staying with friends and family, but 3 700 have sought refuge in a transit camp, hastily set up in a former cassava field on the outkirts of town, and many others are still sleeping rough.
The transit camp was originally designed to accommodate a maxium of 1 000 people and is already badly overcrowded. Relief workers said it is rapidly turning into a permanent refugee camp.
Several relief agencies have already begun to work there. GTZ of Germany supplies the camp with drinking water, Caritas is serving its inhabitants with three hot meals a day and Save the Children is looking after 240 young refugees who have become separated from their parents.
So far, there have been no serious food shortages in Tabou. Most of those fleeing the fighting in Liberia, managed to bring a little money with them. And the UN World Food Programme has been trucking in emergency supplies along the pot-holed road from the port of San Pedro. But in Tabou market, the price of staple foods such as cassava, plantain, tomatoes and hot peppers, has trebled since the influx began.
At the local hospital, Nathalie Kouakou, a local girl, writhes in pain in the delivery room as she waits to give birth because there are no drugs left to help induce her baby. The additional strain placed by the refugees on the hospital’s meagre resources, has exhausted its stock of many basic medicines and vaccines.
“The hospital was already suffering from a lack of materials, medicines and first aid supplies,” said Jean Agbate-Agbate, the surgeon, as he showed visited relief workers round by torch light, the electricity supply being off once again. “Given that the population has more than tripled with the influx of refugees, our water tank, which is only resupplied between 6.00 and 6.30 am every two days, has been taken over by the local population, ” he added.
Relations with the Model forces who fly the Liberian flag on the other side of the Cavally river remain tense. Bouah Kamon, an official of the Ivorian foreign ministry, said the government believed that Model were holding 3 000 Ivorian refugees in Harper as a bargaining chip for eventual negotiations with the government in Abidjan.
Although diplomats believe the Ivorian government has armed and supported Model, which appeared on the scene in March this year, there is little love lost between the Liberian rebel movement and the inhabitants of Tabou district.
“Every day the ‘warriors’ on the Ivorian side of the river and the rebels of Model on the other, glare at each other like fighting dogs,” said John Tahine, headman of the border village of Prollo. – Irin