Ghana to Reject Liberians Aboard Freighter

Liberians fleeing their country’s civil war aboard a damaged freighter will not be allowed entry into Ghana, U.N. and Ghanaian officials said Saturday.

“Only Ghanaians, U.N. officials, aid workers and foreign nationals seeking transit through Ghana will be allowed to disembark,” the U.N. refugee agency’s representative in Accra, Chrysantus Ache, told Ghana News Agency.

Ghanaian Foreign Minister Obed Asamoah said earlier that the freighter Bulk Challenge, which was forced back to sea by Ivory Coast on Thursday after emergency repairs, would have to wait offshore while its passengers were screened.

“We don’t want to take any more refugees,” Asamoah told the news agency. He expressed concern that many of the 3,000 to 4,000 passengers aboard the Nigerian freighter are faction fighters responsible for wreaking havoc in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, in a month of bloodshed and vandalism.

Ivory Coast Interior Minister Emile Constant Bombet, defending his decision to force the vessel back to sea, had said 2,065 passengers are guerrillas.

Asamoah’s deputy, Mohammed ibn Chambas, said later Saturday that Ghana was still discussing with the West African peacekeeping force in Liberia how to create conditions for the return of the Liberians.

Ibn Chambas said his latest information indicated that the Bulk Challenge was advancing toward the port of Tema, near Accra. Officials said they expected it to anchor there early today.

Meanwhile, medical workers expressed fear that an outbreak of diarrhea aboard the vessel was a sign of cholera, which is often fatal if not immediately treated.

Phil Doherty, head of the Liberian mission of Doctors Without Borders, said the relief agency had sent a small boat with a doctor and nurse to follow the Bulk Challenge to Ghana and would demand that a doctor be allowed to help with the medical screenings.

He said there was little water or food on the freighter and only one toilet. The refugees, he said, had been reduced to drinking seawater.

“If there is cholera on board, under those circumstances, those people have a very poor expectancy,” Doherty said.

Also Saturday, a second ship teeming with sick and hungry people fleeing the fighting in Liberia sought a West African port of refuge, as authorities determined whether to let them ashore.

More than 1,300 refugees were on the merchant vessel Victory Reefer, which anchored 10 miles off Freetown, Sierra Leone, about 250 miles northwest of Monrovia.

They were largely citizens of Sierra Leone, unlike the refugees aboard the Bulk Challenge.