RIGHTS-GUINEA: Trauma of War Resurfaces, Often among Women Refugees

By Saliou Samb Reprint | | Print |

Saliou Samb

CONAKRY, May 26 2004 (IPS) - Under a makeshift tent in the Laine refugee camp in southern Guinea, Charlesetta Kollie, a Liberian refugee, buckles down to teach dressmaking to a new group of apprentices.

Kollie’s nine students have four sewing machines with which to stitch together women’s garments – the camisoles and pagnes – that are common in the sub-region. Sometimes the women learn how to mend torn dresses. Their target is to learn how to sew in order to have a trade when they return to Liberia.

Kollie, Yassah Sakie, and Namini Tinna are among the Liberian refugees participating in the Laine camp’s Gender-Based Violence programme (GBV) in Guinea. While at the camp, the women try to stitch their lives back together, despite Liberia’s longstanding civil war and problems inherent to being a refugee.

Before she fled her country, Kollie ran a training centre in Liberia. That life now seems a distant memory, as she takes stock of her present living conditions and reveals her nostalgia for the past.

“Even though I had everything I wanted, I left Liberia after Charles Taylor was elected (president) in 1997. I first fled to Gbinta in Cote d’Ivoire, before the war in that country forced me to flee to Guinea,” she told IPS. Kollie left Liberia as rebels were closing in on Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

“One of my three children got sick and died during the trip. I no longer hear anything from my family, but my husband and my surviving children are with me in Laine,” Kollie said. “I was fortunate that they recruited me as a sewing instructor, and I’ve been teaching other refugees in the Gender-Based Violence programme ever since.”

Compared to Kollie’s, the life of 30-year-old Yassah Sakie, who was captured and raped by a soldier in the regular Liberian army, has been a living hell.

“I was taken prisoner because one of the soldiers claimed I was the wife of a Krahn (the ethnic group of Samuel Doe, the former Liberian dictator who was executed by rebel leader Prince Johnson on Sep. 9, 1990). I was raped and left in the bushes. That experience had serious repercussions for me. But I’ve been able to reorganise myself and begin a new life,” Sakie told IPS.

Before enrolling in the course, Sakie said, “I had no hope, but now, I’d like to learn something that will help me take care of myself, as well as my three children. Sometimes my children have no food, clothing, or shoes.”

The programme, which helps the refugees to heal the trauma of war by teaching them a trade, has a budget of over 50,000 dollars. And most of it comes from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

One of the students, Namini Tinna, a 19-year-old mother, wants to pursue a regular education. “I’m learning to sew, but I’d like to be educated and be independent. My greatest wish is to succeed in life and reconnect with my parents, from whom I was separated in 1998,” she told IPS.

Besides domestic violence and rape, the trauma of war resurfaces often, especially among women, in Laine camp, which is situated within kilometers of the Liberian border.

Fatoumata Diariou Tounkara, the press officer at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Guinea, says incidents in the camp range from domestic violence to rape.

“Between January and March 2004, there were 391 incidents of violence against women in Laine, 18 of which involved sexual abuse, four of which rape and 95 of which domestic violence,” she told IPS.

“We provide psychological, medical and legal assistance for the survivors of violence. In the case of rape, we provide medical treatment to prevent undesired pregnancies and HIV/AIDS,” Marie-Aimee Marita, a GBV course instructor, explained to IPS.

“We file complaints against the perpetrators and sometimes we succeed in having them prosecuted,” she added. Some of their successes include the complaints filed in the 18 rape cases. And refugees who are found guilty of rape are sent to prison, and serve out their time in Guinea, Marita told IPS.

The programme was set up by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an American non-governmental organisation, with the help of UNICEF. The IRC is a refugee agency that provides help to children as well as adults. The programme was started in Guinea in early 1990s to help refugees who are psychologically scarred by war.

At Laine camp some refugees had become mute because of the psychological trauma they had endured. Others have difficulty speaking about their past. The IRC was founded in 1933 at the suggestion of physicist Albert Einstein to help opponents of Nazism in Germany.

In 2003, UNICEF contributed 16,000 dollars for a legal training programme in Guinea. The programme provides refugees with awareness about their legal rights both inside and outside of refugee camps.

For her part, Kollie says, “I’d like to continue to do the same thing in Liberia as soon as the situation permits. The GBV programme should be continued there.”

Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who visited Guinea on Apr 29-May 1, announced that Liberian refugees would soon be returning home.

Of the 80,000 refugees living in Laine, more than 32,000 are Liberians. At the height of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars, the UNHCR helped shelter more than 600,000 refugees in this impoverished West African nation.

“We’ve already repatriated more than 80 percent of the Sierra Leoneans. The Liberian refugees need to begin thinking about returning home,” Lubbers told IPS.

Another refugee camp in Kouankan, 801 kilometres from Conakry, also received Liberians who fled at the height of that country’s conflict. All Liberian refugees are currently in Laine camp, or living in Guinean villages and cities. There is, however, one thing that unites them: the end of war in Liberia, so they can peaceably return home.

“We have to prepare the groundwork in Liberia, and that’ll take some time. It means that repatriation efforts will not begin before January 2005,” Lubbers said.