Congolese displaced by Ugandan rebels to receive UN aid

The flood of Congolese civilians fleeing raids by the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are in dire need of food, shelter, medicines, clothes and other aid items, and United Nations’ relief will begin reaching them tomorrow despite immense logistical challenges, the Organization’s refugee agency said today.

“This remote and increasingly unstable area poses immense logistical challenges for aid agencies due to the lack of roads or their poor condition,” Ron Redmond, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said, following renewed assaults in the north-east Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the past week.

“We continue to work with local authorities and other agencies on finding ways of delivering assistance in these insecure and inaccessible areas,” Mr. Redmond added.

The estimated number of people displaced since the attacks began last September now stands at 135,000, according to UNHCR.

More than 560 Congolese people have been killed by the LRA, a Ugandan rebel group notorious for abducting children for troops and sex slaves, over the past four months, the agency said.

The attacks have prompted condemnation from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council, which last week voiced its grave concern at the scale of the atrocities and emphasized that those responsible must be brought to justice.

A UNHCR team in the town of Dungu, in Orientale Province, that itself was raided by the LRA in November, reported that the group on Saturday attacked the nearby town of Tora, killing residents, pillaging and burning homesteads.

Some 15,000 people who fled Tora and neighbouring villages reached Dungu, which already hosts some 54,000 internally displaced persons (IDPS), over the weekend, arriving on motorbikes, bicycles and on foot, the team said.

Carrying few possessions, the new arrivals have occupied public buildings, schools and empty houses. They told UNHCR many more people are on their way to Dungu, hiding or taking a break in the forests along the way.

UNHCR said that this morning it would support the local Red Cross in starting rapid registration of the newly arrived population and identifying those in urgent need.

The distribution of food and aid items such as plastic tarpaulins, blankets, sleeping mats and soap will start tomorrow in the village of Bamokandi, 17 kilometres north of Dungu, and eventually will cover the whole Dungu area.

In other developments in the region today, Olusegun Obasanjo, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on the Great Lakes Region, met today in Kinshasa with DRC President Joseph Kabila, who briefed him on joint Congolese-Rwandan operations against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebel group, blamed for much of the violence in the eastern DRC, which are expected to last some weeks.

Meanwhile, negotiations on lasting peace in the region continue under the facilitation of Special Envoy Obasanjo and former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa.