The army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has prevented 1 100 refugees returning home from Burundi, leaving them stuck in no-man’s-land between the two countries, officials said on Thursday.
”This morning, six trucks carrying about 500 DRC refugees arrived at the border post in Gatumba (western Burundi), where 411 were already in the zone between Burundi and DRC,” chief border official Jerome Ndikuriyo said.
The trucks had been rented privately and the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, was not involved in this impromptu repatriation attempt.
Two hundred more refugees arrived at the border post on Thursday afternoon, police sources said.
Many of the refugees are Banyamulenge, Congolese Tutsis of Rwandan ancestry whose presence in eastern DRC is resented by many of the region’s other inhabitants.
After 160 refugees in a camp in Gatumba were massacred by as yet unidentified assailants on August 13. The UNHCR set up two other camps further away from the border, but only about 10 of Gatumba’s former residents took up an offer to be moved there.
The refugees at the border post refused a request by a DRC military officer to return to Burundi for a few days to allow DRC authorities to make preparations for their return. Most of them fled DRC’s eastern Kivu provinces in June during
clashes between renegade troops and regular army forces. – Sapa-AFP