Liberia’s displaced hope election will deliver ticket home

LIBERIAN refugee Yatta Holmes bears a scar along her left eye where rebels slashed her face with a machete during an attack on her town several years ago.

The 16-year-old is one of the millions uprooted from their homes by a vicious 14-year civil war that ended in 2003 and who hopes the peace will be sealed by government elections today.

The presidential and legislative elections will be the first vote since the war ended and a caretaker national-unity government took over to arrange the ballot. Some 15,000 UN peacekeepers will be on hand to maintain calm.

"I want to go home, but I don't have any money," says Ms Holmes, who passes idle days in a relief camp playing board games with mismatched, handmade dice.

She cannot remember when she last attended school.

When rebels attacked Ms Holmes' village, she ran towards the capital, Monrovia, and settled on its northern outskirts at Wilson's Corner camp, where about 9,000 refugees live.

Aid workers say nearly all of Liberia's three million people have been uprooted from their homes by fighting at some point during the West African nation's crisis, which began in 1989 with an insurgency by ex-President Charles Taylor, then a warlord. He was elected president in 1997 during an interlude in fighting.

The struggle left some 250,000 dead before it ended in August 2003 with Taylor's flight into exile in Nigeria as rebels fighting a battle to oust him attacked his stronghold, Monrovia.

Hundreds of thousands of civil-war-displaced Liberians like Ms Holmes are living rough away from their homes inside Liberia or in surrounding nations two years after the conflict ended and aid workers say they need to return home to help rebuild the devastated nation.

But most of the displaced, who fled as fighting neared, lack even the means for a ride home. They're trapped and rely on help from the United Nations and other aid organisations.