Sierra Leone refugees prefer chances at home

SINJE, Liberia -- After losing everything to Sierra Leone's feared rebels, Emmanuel Kwashie was finally starting to rebuild his life in neighboring Liberia. But as gunfire started again, he didn't hesitate.

Gathering his wife and two small sons, he took to the road -- this time back to Sierra Leone, where one of West Africa's most savage conflicts was officially declared over last month.

"Every time you try to make your life, the fighting comes," he said, feeding spoonfuls of rice out of a plastic cup to his 2-year-old as the family rested in an abandoned house shot up in recent fighting. "If we are going to die, it is better to go home and die there."

Until recently, many of the 100,000 Sierra Leoneans living in Liberia were nervous about returning home -- especially to parts of the country controlled by rebels whose signature atrocity was hacking off the hands, feet, noses, lips and ears of their victims. But when a 2-year-old rebellion reached the outskirts of Liberia's capital, Monrovia, 10 days ago, thousands packed their belongings and headed for the border -- many walking days to get there.

Fled to forest

For Kwashie's family, the nightmare began more than 10 years ago in Sierra Leone's eastern Kenema district, when rebels burst into their town, burning, looting and killing. Kwashie's mother and father died in the attack, and his two daughters were lost in the panic.

Fleeing into the forest, he began a monthlong journey over the border and into Liberia, where he lived in a succession of refugee camps. War caught up with him again in Monrovia, where feuding warlords reduced almost every building to rubble during a seven-year conflict that killed more than 150,000 people and forced 2.6 million from their homes.

After a final 1996 peace accord, followed by elections in 1997, Kwashie moved to Tubmanburg, a provincial capital in the heart of Liberia's northwestern diamond-mining region. Here he found a room for his family and built a small but successful masonry business.

He left it all behind when heavy gunfire broke out Wednesday in the town 37 miles north of Monrovia.

When the shooting subsided, the family loaded what they could into two wheelbarrows and started the 25-mile trek southwest toward Sinje, where the U.N. refugee agency has started repatriating Sierra Leonean refugees from Liberia's two largest camps.

By Saturday they had reached Klay Junction.

Some 5,400 Sierra Leonean refugees -- along with about 7,600 Liberians -- have crossed into Sierra Leone since the Feb. 7 Klay attack.