Refugee camp fears new tide

Wearing Calvin Klein jeans and hairstyles worthy of the Oscars, young Liberian women prance down dirty streets here in polished pumps, their wake of perfume catching the attention of young men.

It's not the expected image of a West African refugee camp, where food lines and buzzing flies are the norm. But this isn't the typical refugee camp.

This is Buduburam, a sprawling complex housing 25,000 refugees, where dozens wait to check their e-mail at the Internet cafe, people lick strawberry ice- cream cones, and posters encourage young women to sign up for the Miss Liberia Pageant.

"I've never seen a refugee camp with an Internet cafe," says Thomas Albrecht, the head of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) office in Ghana's capital, Accra. "There are a lot of positive features." Mr. Albrecht points to the active health clinic and a women's group working to start a garbage collection program and a daycare facility.

Though Buduburam is hardly the ideal place to live, humanitarian officials say the camp is a success story, a model of how self-reliant refugees can build a thriving community and work hand-in-hand with aid agencies.

But overcrowding has taken a toll. The camp is well over its 10,000-person capacity. And as the four-month crisis in neighboring Ivory Coast drags on, and the UNHCR prepares for tens of thousands of possible asylum seekers, the problems Buduburam faces present a cautionary tale.

With the only border open to the Ivory Coast, Ghana is the country of choice for many. Mr. Albrecht says that the UNHCR is preparing for 35,000 asylum seekers and refugees - both Ivorian nationals who cross the border as asylum seekers and Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees who were living in the Ivory Coast. They are also planning for 15,000 Ghanaians who might return, and a transit population - people passing through on their way to other countries - of 132,000. Nini Akiwumi, the chairman of Ghana's Refugee Board, says any influx would hurt the country.

He says Ghana doesn't have the financial means to care for an exodus of refugees, and adds that any large number presents a security risk, as fleeing rebels could be mixed in with the refugees. "We would expect the international community to come to our assistance," Mr. Akiwumi says.

In its salad days, Buduburam was the Ritz of refugee camps, with its health clinic, numerous churches, and schools. Maxwell Owusu, an anthropologist from the University of Michigan, who has studied Buduburam, notes that its success can be attributed to the refugees' determination, Ghanaians' generosity, and a huge response from nongovernmental organizations.

"Ultimately the greatest credit goes to the refugees themselves, especially the women who were determined against all odds to work hard to make a decent home away from home for themselves and their children," wrote Mr. Owusu in an article about the camp.

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