A House with Two Rooms - The Advocates for Human Rights

statement givers as the reason they left Côte d’Ivoire.
Sierra Leone
Tens of thousands of refugees from Liberia fled to Sierra Leone, particularly during the second civil
war. During the 1990s, there were fewer than 14,000 Liberians in Sierra Leone, but starting in 2002,
more than 60,000 people had sought refuge there. 177 Nearby Lofa County produced the majority of
Liberians who left to live in Sierra Leone as refugees. 178 Accordingly, some chose not to move into
UNHCR camps because they could integrate into the local community and wanted to be near the
border to tend fields back home. 179 But when fighting arose in March 2002, many Liberians who had
settled in villages in Sierra Leone along the border with Liberia were moved by UNHCR further
inland. 180
One statement giver described his memories of life as a refugee in Sierra Leone to the TRC:
Life in Bo was very difficult for us. We and the other Liberian refugees were
often mistreated by the Sierra Leoneans and discriminated against. On one
occasion, my male cousin got into a fight at the village water pump after
one of the local residents had cut him in line for water. During the fight, the
cousin was badly injured. Instead of investigating the incident and punishing
the individual who had instigated the fight, the police arrested my cousin
instead…
One night after living in Bo for approximately eight months, I awoke to
hear gunshots being fired. I jumped out of bed and started running into the
woods with my brother. As I was running, a bullet passed between us and
came within inches of hitting us. While fleeing, we were separated from the
rest of our family…We traveled for a week on foot from Bo to Freetown.
As we traveled, we encountered many more people fleeing the violence and
eventually were reunited with some of our family members including my
aunt and her three children, two brothers, and another cousin. The refugees
traveled together as a group, sleeping on the ground, drinking river and rain
water, collecting cans of food that [we] found along the way, and begging for
rice and other food when [we] would encounter villages on the way. During
this time, only one family allowed the group to stay temporarily with them.
On one occasion [we] encountered a Red Cross mobile unit, but the unit had
no plates or utensils, so [we] had to eat the food out of their hands.
Eventually, we reached a refugee camp near Freetown. The camp had no
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