A report by Esther Schirrmacher
Ghana 2024: Together with Thomas Schirrmacher, Martin Warnecke and Matthias Böhning, I visited the Buduburam refugee camp, also known as the “Liberia Camp”, about 1.5 hours west of the Ghanaian capital Accra. Originally, we only wanted to receive a report from our contact person George Bannerman (Gebende Hände supplies water containers to the camp), who has been coordinating aid in the camp for years. However, we spontaneously decided to take a look at the situation on site ourselves.
Shortly before our trip, on February 27th at four o’clock in the morning, the people in the Buduburam refugee camp were awakened from their sleep by bulldozers. The Ghanaian government had begun to demolish large parts of the camp that morning. 15,000 people were directly affected and have since sought refuge in emergency shelters in nearby
churches and schools.
The refugee camp was established in 1990 and is mainly home to people from Liberia who fled to Ghana to escape the civil war in their countries. Over the decades, tens of thousands of people have settled in Buduburam. Estimates for the total number of people housed in the camp range from 45,000 to 60,000.
In mid-October 2022, the chair of the Ghanaian Refugee Council, Professor Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah, announced in Geneva at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that the Ghanaian state would close the refugee camp in a “safe, humane and efficient manner, in accordance with national and international law and Ghana’s human rights obligations”.
He spoke both about the repatriation of the Liberian refugees to their country of origin and about the possibility of their integration into Ghanaian society. According to press reports, Professor Attafuah stated in Geneva that Ghana continues to fulfill its obligation to protect the security and dignity of refugees and asylum seekers in the country.
The use of bulldozers to systematically and extensively destroy mud huts that provide simple shelter for people in need cannot be described as “humane”. The people of Buduburam are still waiting for an official explanation from the Ghanaian government as to exactly what happened on February 27 and why parts of the camp were suddenly destroyed so violently.
In Geneva, Professor Attafuah held out the prospect of the refugees receiving a so-called “Ghana Card”, a Ghanaian identity card. This enables full integration into Ghanaian society through employment and income opportunities, as well as access to financial services, etc. Neither the coordinator of the Buduburam refugee camp, Dennis Gwion Dixon, nor George Bannerman, who has been coordinating humanitarian aid in the camp for many years, know of any refugees who have received such a Ghana Card.
The people in the Buduburam refugee camp need real prospects for successful integration into Ghanaian society. The Ghanaian government must follow up its words in Geneva with action. ISHR will continue to work to ensure that the fate of the people in the Buduburam refugee camp is not forgotten and that real solutions are found.
The aid organization, which is a close cooperation partner of the ISHR, has been providing financial support to the people of Buduburam for many years to cover their basic needs for food, water and medicine. Seeing the poverty of the people here is deeply touching and leaves one speechless in the face of their lack of prospects.
Afterwards, we visited a hospital supported by Gebende Hände that urgently needs a minibus to collect patients from the surrounding area and transport them to the hospital for treatment.
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