Alarm bells are ringing at the Budumburam Camp set up in 1990 to cater for 8,000 Liberians who needed refuge from the ravaging war of Liberia at the time. The camp, which now harbours some 30,000 people, is overflowing with people of dubious characters, according to unimpeachable sources in the National Security apparatus.
Of the 30,000 people at Budumburam, an estimated 4,000 are suspected to be combatants, with some of them possessing assault rifles and other deadly weapons of war, our sources have intimated. Because of the skills, weapons, the yearning for action and the spoils of war that a sizeable section of the Budumburam community has, the camp has become a fertile ground for recruiting mercenaries for the battles in the sub-region of West Africa.
One security source intimated that at the peak of the Laurent Gbagbo/rebels battles in neighbouring C?te d’Ivoire both sides of the divide were recruiting fighters from Budumburam, a piece of information corroborated by our contacts in the camp.
Similar recruitments are said to have been done in the past into Sierra Leone, another war-torn country in the sub-region.
One danger is that wrong signals can be sent out to the governments and rebels in the countries engulfed in internal conflicts that the Ghana government backs the recruitment of fighters against them, according to experts.
But the more dangerous thing is that Budumburam can be turned into an ''easy training ground for coup-makers prodded by ambitious soldiers, disgruntled politicians or criminals who fear the on-going trials of fraudsters could catch up with them,'' another source added. Relatively smaller threats the camp poses include massive drug and sexual abuse and insanitary conditions capable of starting cholera and other killer diseases.
Because of their capability to handle weapons some of the residents of Budumburam have turned the camp into a recruitment ground for armed robbers, it was further learnt.
What is interesting about the situation is that some of the supposed refugees use Budumburam as a trading post. They buy goods from Ghana, whose trade liberalization policy has resulted in flooding of the markets with assorted goods, and carry them to Monrovia and other cities of Liberia to sell.
As they enter and leave their home country, none of these economic refugees are touched by the supposedly tyrannical Charles Taylor government. ''Really they are no refugees; they are only taking advantage of the Ghanaian hospitality,'' a source in the National Security apparatus concluded.
Inquiries at the Immigration Department showed that if those Liberians want to remain in the country to trade across Ghana’s frontiers, what they need to do is to procure business visas and not disguise themselves as political refugees.
Chronicle can confidently say that governments, first the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and now the New Patriotic Party (NPP), have been worried by developments at Budumburam. But restraint have been considered by both governments essential because of the leading role Ghana has all along been playing in the unity and co-operation among the 16 countries in the West African sub-region.
