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UNHCR Head Arrives In Guinea To Assess West African Situation
CONAKRY, Feb 10 (News Agencies) - U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Ruud Lubbers arrived here Saturday to begin a tour of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to assess the plight of hundreds of thousands trapped by fighting.
Lubbers, a former Dutch prime minister, is due to travel to the southeastern Guinean town of Kissidougou on Sunday, in his first trip to Africa since taking the top job at the U.N. refugee agency last month.
The area is around 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of the town of Guekedou, a town in the Parrot's Beak area close to the border with both Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The region is home to 180,000 refugees and 70,000 Guineans, caught for months in a deadly crossfire between Guinean troops and opposition fighters, who authorities in Conakry say come from Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The fighting, which has killed more than 1,000 people since September, has recently shot up, triggering the worst humanitarian crisis the United Nations is currently facing, according to the refugee agency.
Guekedou, a former base for aid agencies, was this month mainly pounded to rubble, relief workers said.
Guinea is now home to more than 400,000 refugees, including nearly 300,000 from Sierra Leone and more than 120,000 from Liberia.
The UNHCR on Saturday expressed its concern for the refugees caught in the fighting and without support.
But Lubbers said he was "optimistic about finding new solutions" to the problem in his upcoming meetings with officials in the countries concerned, despite admitting that the exact nature of the situation was still unclear.
The refugee agency said earlier on Saturday that thousands of people had fled new fighting in the southeast of the country, where an armed group had retaken Guekedou.
It added that it was planning to send a convoy of trucks to the road between Guekedou and Kissidougou to pick up the most vulnerable and take them to safety.
Guinean military sources said "rebels" - a coalition of Guinean dissidents and fighters from both Liberia's ULIMO faction and Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front - had retaken Guekedou on Friday, after Guinean troops had recaptured the town just a week earlier.
The UNHCR started last Tuesday to transfer refugees from a camp in Nyaedou, about 15 kilometers from Guekedou, to Albadaria, some 200 kilometers further north, far from the borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The agency moved 675 refugees on Tuesday and Wednesday, but had to suspend the operation Thursday when new fighting broke out at Guekedou, before resuming the transfer on Friday.
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