DR of Congo emergency costs 1,200 lives a day, UN refugee agency chief says

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres has appealed urgently for resources for the desperately under-funded emergency in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where he said continuing conflicts in parts of the central African country were taking more lives than did the Indian Ocean tsunami.

“We have a tsunami in the Congo every six months,” Mr. Guterres, on his first official visit to Germany since becoming High Commissioner last June, said at a news conference in Berlin Tuesday with the German Minister for Development Cooperation, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul.

Some 1,200 people in the DRC die daily from conflict-related causes. More than 20 per cent of the children die before their fifth birthday and one in10 die in the first year of life. The refugee agency’s appeal last year for the repatriation and reintegration of Congolese refugees received only 14 per cent of the needed funding, or $10.6 million out of the $75 million required.

Meanwhile, of $14.7 million requested for UNHCR’s programme for internally displaced people (IDPs) in a country the size of Western Europe, only $3.2 million had come in.

The plight of conflict victims in DRC, as the country prepares for historic elections, was one of the “10 Stories the World Should Hear More About” that the UN Department of Public Information recently spotlighted.

Mr. Guterres also stressed the need to support the new peace agreement in Sudan’s Darfur region and urged the international community “to make sure” the pact was implemented.

“Darfur is the epicentre of an earthquake that is threatening the whole region,” he said. “If we do not solve the problems in Darfur, the whole region will not find stability.”

UNHCR recently had to scale back its IDP programme in Darfur because of growing insecurity. In neighbouring Chad, meanwhile, the agency is running a large-scale relief and protection programme for more than 200,000 Sudanese from Darfur who live in refugee camps there.

Mr. Guterres said Germany and other European Union (EU) countries were not only important as major donors who fund UNHCR through voluntary contributions, but as countries which maintain strong domestic asylum systems for refugees. He pointed, however, to the sharp decline in the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers in Germany as well as other industrialized countries.

He said his Office has high hopes for the German Presidency of the EU, starting next January, adding, “Europe must remain a space of asylum.”

Mr. Guterres returned to Geneva today.