Refugees Guinea

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing bloodshed in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau have sought temporary shelter in this neighboring West African country over the past decade. The search for a quiet place in one of the continent's most volatile regions has turned the Guinean border into a sprawling collection of refugee settlements. About 80 clusters of hastily built mud-and-grass huts extend across 300 miles of lush, tropical rain forests.

The United Nations refugee agency began trucking an estimated 50,000 refugees away from Guinea's southern border, where they are threatened by frontier fighting in West Africa. The refugees, from Sierra Leone and Liberia, fled civil wars in their homelands in the 1990s for the relative safety of Guinea but have been caught up in a widening conflict around the diamond fields where the three countries' borders meet.

The United Nations refugee agency began trucking an estimated 50,000 refugees away from Guinea's southern border, where they are threatened by frontier fighting in West Africa. The refugees, from Sierra Leone and Liberia, fled civil wars in their homelands in the 1990s for the relative safety of Guinea but have been caught up in a widening conflict around the diamond fields where the three countries' borders meet.

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing bloodshed in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau have sought temporary shelter in this neighboring West African country over the past decade. The search for a quiet place in one of the continent's most volatile regions has turned the Guinean border into a sprawling collection of refugee settlements. About 80 clusters of hastily built mud-and-grass huts extend across 300 miles of lush, tropical rain forests.

The News: Five West African nations are sending a military task force to Liberia in a regional effort to end that country's seven-month civil war, which has cost more than 5,000 lives and turned 400,000 persons into refugees. Nigeria, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Togo--all, ironically, headed by military governments and operating under the banner of the Economic Community of West African States--are commiting troops to a task force totaling some 2,500 men.