Thousands of people displaced by decades of low-level conflict in the southern part of the Casamance region of Senegal have started returning to their villages in recent years, according to a researcher working in the area, and there are signs that thousands more may return in the near future, he added.

“Generally people in the area along the border with Guinea Bissau are optimistic and I don’t think that it’s a naive optimism,” Martin Evans, a geographer at the University of Leicester who has been researching the social and economic dimensions of the conflict for more than seven years. He spoke to IRIN on Wednesday ahead of presenting his findings to the Association of American Geographers at a meeting to be held in April in San Francisco.

“With no reports of major fighting south of the Casamance River in recent years many of the estimated 60,000 displaced are starting to say that conditions are now favourable enough for their return,” he said.

“A few have led the way and they are giving others the confidence to follow. I am not in a position to provide overall figures but I think it’s safe to say that we are reaching a critical mass with the return process starting to snowball,” he said.

However, fighting has worsened recently north of the Casamance River towards The Gambia, particularly around the towns of Sindian and Djibidion. In the last year thousands of people in the north have been displaced as northern factions of the rebel Movement of Democratic Forces in the Casamance (MFCD) fight each other and the Senegalese army.

On Saturday representative of the country’s ruling party who was the chairman of the Ziguinchor regional council was killed in his home in Sindian, presumably by rogue groups within the Casamance rebel movement.

How things have changed

Historically most of the fighting in the Casamance had been in the south, not the north, Evans said. “The south is where most of the long-term displacement occurred and where most of the mines were planted.”

The Casamance dispute started out as a mostly peaceful separatist movement in 1982 but deteriorated into a more serious and complex armed conflict in 1990. Violence spread south of the border into neighbouring Guinea Bissau in 1998 following a coup there and the intervention of Senegalese troops.

A peace process signed in December 2004 between the government and the MFDC leadership has been the basis for ongoing talks. “The ongoing fighting in the north suggests that while the process is advancing not everyone is on board yet,” Evans said.

But the peace process is working in the south, he said. “When I started my research in 2000 there was little prospect of people from the south returning home,” Evans said. But in the last five years, the armies of the two countries have been able to make the border area more secure, he said.

“This has allowed donors to come back,” he said. “Returns to some villages have been used by political leaders and NGOs to get donor support but what I found surprising when I was there now was how many people are returning quietly on their own, using their own resources.”

Evans’s research has mostly been in the rural community of Boutoupa-Camaracounda south-east of the regional capital Ziguinchor where most of the 24 villages were abandoned in 1992 following heavy fighting. Upon revisiting the area in recent weeks he found many villages still abandoned but others that were full of people and new houses with shiny zinc roofs.

As a geographer, Evans said he was struck by how the villages were being laid out differently to the way they had been before. “The houses are packed closer together now and located on main roads. I think people have decided to live like that now in the interests of collective security.”

Push and pull factors

Most of the people displaced by the conflict have been living in towns and villages in the Casamance and Guinea Bissau and those Evans talked with said they were sick of having to live there in the homes of their relatives for years. “Most have been without access to land and they want to try to do something with their lives” he said. “Emotionally they all still regard their villages as home.”

Those now returning face huge challenges. “I went to one village to see the house of a family that had completely crumbled. The only thing still standing was the tombstone of the former head of the family,” he said. “Imagine returning to see your fields overgrown with bush. These people have nothing.”

Yet he said he was struck by how they have been able to mobilize resources to restart their villages, often from scratch. “They have social networks by which to re-establish livelihoods and build wells, schools and dispensaries,” he said.

At Bambadinka, one of the main villages in the area near the Guinea Bissau border which saw some of the heaviest fighting in the history of the conflict, the population displaced for years in Ziguinchor have started organizing work parties to go down to the village for a day and clear roads to prepare their future return. “This used to be an important village in the area so if people from there go back I think it will send a strong signal to other villages that it is now safe for them to return too,” he said.

He made two provisos to the continuation of the return process. “De-mining operations have to get going properly and obviously there can’t be a return to violence.” However he also said that the people he interviewed all told him that if the conflict were to reignite this time they would stay. “They all said to me that they’d sooner die than be displaced again.”