UN running out of DRC money

2006-09-09 22:05

Gety - The United Nations is running out of money to feed the 1.7 million displaced people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland on Saturday.

Visiting the eastern DRC Gety camp, home to 43 000 displaced people, Egeland said the central African country had witnessed the worst humanitarian disaster in the world over the past decade.

He compared it to the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, in which 800 000 people were killed in a few months.

"Congo is a disaster zone. Nowhere else in the world has lost four million people in the last eight years," said Egeland. "That is six Rwandan genocides. The world said never again but this is Rwanda again and again."

The tens of thousands of people in Gety were displaced by a joint offensive between the DRC army and UN peacekeepers earlier this year.

The offensive aimed to rout renegade groups that have not yet disarmed from a 1998 to 2003 war involving six of the DRC's neighbours.

'Polls have not ended fighting'

Egeland said that, only a few weeks before his visit, people had been dying of hunger at the camp.

The UN World Food Programme was able to get supplies to Gety in August, he said, but resources remained extremely tight.

"We do not have any more money to extend food pipeline for the rest of this year. We need $7m dollars a month to keep going into 2007 here in Congo," said the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

July's historic elections, the first free polls in 40 years in the DRC, have not ended the fighting nor stopped the humanitarian crisis in the former Belgian colony, he said.

The international community paid $460m to finance the polls in the hope they would stabilise the region.

"It is too bad really that in this crucial year to make peace in the heart of Africa we do not even have enough funding for food," said Egeland.

- Reuters