[The following article is part of an IRIN Web Special on the challenges of refugee return and reintegration. The Web Special, The Long Journey Home, is available at: http://www.irinnews.org/webspecials/rr/default.asp]
BAMA, 18 February (IRIN) - More than 365,000 people have fled from violence in Cote d'Ivoire to safety in Burkina Faso over the last two years. However there are no haunting images of refugee camps, packed to overflowing with people who have lost everything. For the new arrivals are former Burkinabe migrants going home. They have simply melted into the villages and the countryside, taken in by relatives and in some cases, even strangers.
They are refugees in their own country.
The civil war that erupted in next-door Cote d'Ivoire in September 2002, and the reprisals against migrants that followed, forced thousands of Burkinabe to leave the land where they had worked for years and head for home.
For some, "home" was a country whose passport they carried but where they had never set foot. They were the children of Burkinabe immigrants born in Cote d'Ivoire who had never been given full Ivorian citizenship.
"I may be Burkinabe but when I came here from Cote d'Ivoire it was my first time in the country," Minata Savadogo, who arrived last year, told IRIN.
The 25-year-old woman was born and grew up in Abidjan, West Africa's most cosmopolitan city. Before the civil war broke out in Cote d'Ivoire, it was viewed as a tropical Paris, with its mix of steamy palm-fringed lagoon, mangrove swamps and gleaming skyscrapers.
But then the Ivorian army went to Minata's home. They accused her of being in league with the rebels who had seized the north of Cote d'Ivoire, an allegation often levelled against Burkinabe.
The soldiers demanded money and when Minata pleaded she had no cash they started to beat her. Her neighbours intervened and the troops went on their way but the episode was enough to persuade her to pack her bags.
Swapping skyscrapers for mud houses
Minata used to sell iced water on the busy streets of Abidjan, where cars and buses stream past glass-fronted high rise buildings and crowds of commuters bustle along the pavements.
Now she is eking out an existence in Bama in western Burkina Faso, a rural town of earth-baked brick houses where the most common vehicles on the dusty streets are bicycles.
"It's very, very hard for us. I grew up in the city, I've no idea how to work the land," she explained as she cradled her two-year old daughter.
Even those used to tilling the land are finding the going tough.
Amidou Compaore once earned a handsome living from his cocoa plantations in the forested south of Cote d'Ivoire, but the dry land around Bama, although fertile by Burkina Faso standards, is proving more difficult to cultivate.
"This year everything is ruined. We've had poor rains and the crops have failed. So now I have lots of kids that need feeding and little to feed them with," the wizened 49-year-old father of 23 said.
Bama, which lies less than 100 km from the Ivorian border, has seen its population swell by about 20 percent since Cote d'Ivoire collapsed into conflict.
"We used to have a population of around 20,000 but now it's 24,000 and that is just based on the people who are here officially," Fatoumata Boly, the town's prefect (government administrator), told IRIN. "We might have twice as many extra people if we take into account those without papers."
Burkina Faso is one of the world's poorest countries, ranked third from bottom of the UN Human Development Index, with only Niger and war-scarred Sierra Leone worse off.
The implosion of Cote d'Ivoire, a country seen by many Burkinabe as an Eldorado where an enterprising man might work his way to modest wealth, has only heightened the problems.
Many Burkinabe families used to receive money from relatives working in Cote d'Ivoire as cocoa planters, petty traders and night watchmen, but with the migrants' return this vital source of income has dried up.
Ballooning population straining resources
And the newly returned migrants - who have added three percent to Burkina Faso's 12 million population are putting more pressure on already scant resources.
"I know people who have had to dismantle their beds to make room for everyone to sleep," Boly explained. "Poverty is growing all the time. What once fed 10 people, now has to feed 20. We have seen a rise in malnutrition here in Bama."
Rassmane Kabore, whose store is a porch in front of his house from which he sells fertiliser and the occasional piece of dried fish, knows about having to share a shrinking pie with more and more people.
His brother's two wives and their three children turned up on his doorstep at the start of 2003 when the fighting in Cote d'Ivoire was at its height. They have been living with him ever since.
Kabore now has to feed 11 mouths instead of six, and this costs him an extra 350 CFA (70 US cents) a day. When business got lean, more drastic measures were called for.
"Before I had a scooter but I had to sell it to make ends meet once my brother's family arrived. Now I get around by bicycle," the petty trader told IRIN, pulling his holey green coat tight about him.
When the mass exodus of Burkinabe from Cote d'Ivoire was in full swing, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the Burkinabe government helped bus people back to their villages and reunite them with their families.
The International Federation of the Red Cross, the UN World Food Programme, the United Nations Children's Fund, the World Heath Organisation (WHO) and other agencies chipped in with aid.
Paradoxically, the generosity which local people showed in welcoming the new arrivals may have doomed longer-term international relief efforts to help the returning migrants.
Latent crisis
"It's never been seen as a humanitarian crisis. All the donors congratulated Burkina Faso for taking these people in and then stopped right there," said Georg Charpentier, the UN Resident Coordinator in the country.
The number of Burkinabe migrants that poured out of Cote d'Ivoire is almost double the number of Darfur refugees that have spilled across the Sudanese border into Chad.
But while overcrowded refugees camps in eastern Chad have repeatedly come under the spotlight, attracting generous international aid, Burkina Faso's masses have largely fallen off the international community's radar screen.
"We're not being confronted with a catastrophic humanitarian vision but that doesn't mean to say there's no crisis. It's a silent, latent crisis ... it is there and it is there for the long haul," Charpentier told IRIN in the capital, Ouagadougou.
He said the problem was worse than the official government statistics suggested, especially when the Burkinabe that flocked home from Cote d'Ivoire in earlier mass departures in 1998 and 1999 are taken into account.
"Overall we think one million people came in these three waves," Charpentier said. "If we leave it alone, thinking that people have been reintegrated, we run the risk of creating a vacuum in which problems between communities and with disenfranchised youth could grow."
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has just recruited a representative for Burkina Faso, an appointment that Charpentier hopes will hone relief efforts. However, he also thinks the government in Ouagadougou needs to bang the drum louder.
Ramato Diallo, acting head of Conasur, the government agency leading efforts to reintegrate the returnees, agrees that much still needs to be done, "We need about 17 billion CFA (US $34 million) to allow us to reintegrate all those that have fled Cote d'Ivoire. There have been small projects here and there, but nothing that targets the problem as a whole," she said.
The money Diallo wants does not seem much, considering that the United Nations has appealed to international donors for US$183 million to feed, clothe and shelter the 200,000 refugees from Darfur who have sought sanctuary in eastern Chad and to help the locals living alongside them.
Parents to work, kids to school
One of the first problems to be tackled in Burkina Faso is employment.
Many of the returning migrants are used to the relatively affluent urban life that Cote d'Ivoire, the economic engine of Francophone West Africa, once offered them.
Those who are skilled farmers don't own hectares here that they can cultivate. And even if they do, the likelihood is they lack the necessary tools and the water for irrigation.
In Bama, the prefect wants to create a fund to loan money to returnees so they can set up their own money-spinners. People could buy tools for an agriculture project, a sewing machine or cooking utensils for clothing and food ventures or a small stock to set up a street stall.
Getting parents back to work is one part of the equation. The other is making sure children continue their education.
A September 2004 survey by Conasur estimated that a third of those who had returned from Cote d'Ivoire were under 15.
"The education system was already overburdened and now there are all these extra children," Diallo, the acting head of the government relief agency, explained.
In Bama, Boly, the prefect, has already requisitioned some disused shops in town and turned them into makeshift classrooms. Hewever, even when space can be found, parents, like Kadijata Sawadogo, are often not in a position to pay the 3,000 CFA (US $6) annual registration fee or to buy books and stationery.
Kadijata spent three months in the Ivorian bush with two children and heavily pregnant with a third before escaping to Bama. She is now trying to scrape together enough money so that her eldest, eight-year-old Jean-Baptiste, can go to school, but finding work is impossible.
"Since we got here, no one has helped us. You just have to do what you can to get by," the 28-year-old sighed.
The IOM is currently looking for donors for projects to help reintegrate the returning migrants, starting with 10,000 people in southwestern Burkina Faso.
Salome Kombere, the director of IOM operations in Ouagadougou, says it will be a hard sell.
"I don't know if we'll end up with the funds we need. I think donors are hesitant because they think these returnees will take off again the moment there is peace in Cote d'Ivoire," she said.
"But when will that be? And how do they live in the meantime?"
[ENDS]
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