DR Congo: UN mission to Central Africa visits war-torn eastern region
The joint mission to Central Africa by the heads of three United Nations humanitarian agencies is now in the eastern
region of the war-shattered Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where they plan to meet refugees returning home by
boat from neighbouring Tanzania.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres, World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director James Morris
and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Ann M. Veneman are on an unprecedented joint visit to the Great Lakes
region to see how best their agencies and the international community can help the peoples of the troubled area make the
transition to a stable peace and full democracy.
The three today visited the DRC's eastern region of south Kivu, which has been racked by continual outbreaks of
fighting.
Only yesterday, the UN Organization Mission in the DRC (MONUC) announced that 300 ‘blue helmets’ of its peacekeeping
force, backed by combat helicopters, were helping the Congolese army to drive out rebels from neighbouring Rwanda who
have been operating in the heavily forested area north of Bukavu, South Kivu’s main city, for the past 10 years.
“MONUC is intervening to bring security to the region and assure the protection of the civilian population,” the mission
said in a statement on its support for more than 1,000 Congolese soldiers seeking to dislodge and disarm Hutu rebels of
the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The Hutus moved across the border in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by
extremist Hutus, in which 800,000 people are estimated to have died.
Mr. Guterres has stressed the importance of finding regional solutions for the Great Lakes, saying that the problems of
DRC, which is moving towards national elections in June as part of a peace plan after the most lethal fighting in the
world since World War II, could not be solved without addressing the problems in Rwanda and Burundi.
A six-year war cost 4 million lives, and medical experts say a further 1,200 people are still dying needlessly every
day. More than 3.4 million have been displaced from their homes and 17 million don't have a steady supply of food.
Later today, the three heads are scheduled to travel on to Rwanda and Burundi, which have also been afflicted by decades
of civil war and humanitarian crises.