MaximsNewsNetwork: DR CONGO António Guterres, UNHCR UN REFUGEE AGENCY

MaximsNewsNetwork: 16 October 2009 - UNHCR: High Commissioner António Guterres compares the Congolese displacement crisis to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, urging the international community to help.

Comparing the hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres on Friday urged the international community not to forget the Congolese in their hour of need.

If you look at the humanitarian situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all the victims victims of conflict, victims of illness, health problems, of extreme poverty the number of people that die, mostly needlessly, every six months is equivalent to the [number of] victims of the Asian tsunami, he said.
Now if you compare the massive support of the international community to the tsunami victims with the support that is given to the DRC every six months, its a stark difference, the High Commissioner added. The December 26, 2004 tsunami killed more than 200,000 people in countries around the Indian Ocean.

Yesterday, the High Commissioner visited several camps for internally displaced people (IDP) in North Kivu as well as neighbouring South Kivu. He toured Shasha and Mubimbi I camp, which host victims of the multiple conflicts that have ravaged the troubled Kivus in the last three years.
In Shasha, North Kivu, Guterres met members of the Bambuti, indigenous forest hunter-gatherers also known as pygmies who have suffered particularly badly over the years. They told him that even if peace and stability return to the region, they have nowhere to live. They appealed to the authorities for help in getting land.
In Mubimbi I, which is situated in South Kivu, Guterres meet a mixed group of IDPs some displaced in previous conflicts and others freshly driven out of their homes during an operation by the Congolese armed forces to disarm the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The High Commissioner also visited Rutoboko in North Kivus Masisi district, which was devastated during clashes between the Congolese armed forces and the rebel National Congress for the Defence of the People in 2008, causing thousands of civilians to flee.
Now many of them are returning to their villages and rebuilding their lives. All along the road there were signs of new life and hope. It is the rainy season and the returnees were busy reconstructing their homes and planting crops such as beans, bananas and cassava. The schools have reopened.
The IDPs began returning home in March this year, when the Congolese government and the rebels signed a peace truce. But the pace quickened last month, when some 66,000 people sheltering in six UNHCR-assisted camps in and around Goma returned to their areas of origins.

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