19/5/2006
DR of Congo Emergency Costing 1,200 Lives A Day

The rate at which the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is destroying lives and livelihoods equates to the effect of suffering the same devastation as the Indian Ocean tsunami every six months, the UN's refugee chief said this week.

António Guterres, the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, on his first official visit to Germany since becoming High Commissioner last June, appealed urgently for resources for the desperately under-funded emergency. “We have a tsunami in the Congo every six months,” Mr. Guterres, said at a news conference in Berlin.

According to the UN some 1,200 people in the DRC die daily from conflict-related causes. More than 20 per cent of 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 funding it required: $10.6 million out of the $75 million.

Meanwhile, of $14.7 million requested for the agency’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 said Germany and other European Union 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 industrialised 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.”