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. The trucks had been rented privately and the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, was not involved in this impromptu repatriation attempt.
Ahmed Idris’s wife is preparing the family’s only meal of the day and there is not enough for their 11 children running around their two little shelters in the middle of the Zamzam refugee camp in Sudan’s Darfur region. The children, some of them with distended bellies, appear malnourished, although their mother says the quantity of the food rations they get has increased considerably in recent months.
Nigerian troops set off for Darfur
There is a meat market, where haunches of goat hang from the thatched roof. There are tea stalls and shacks selling hair mousse and skin cream. Some women dig vegetable plots while their neighbours shape clay and water with their bare hands to build new houses. The refugee camp at Iridimi, in north-eastern Chad, is home to 15 000 people who have fled the violence in Darfur.
Sudanese authorities have restored aid deliveries to a camp for 90 000 displaced people in Darfur, United Nations officials said, three days after soldiers reportedly closed the camp following a mob killing of an alleged pro-government militiaman. More than 400 Sudanese fled Darfur to Chad during the weekend, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ spokesperson for east Chad said on Monday.
Darfur’s messenger of peace
More than 160 Tutsi Congolese refugees massacred at a border camp were buried on Monday, as the African Union said it was sending a team to Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo to investigate the deaths. Nigeria’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo, chairperson of the 53-member AU, on Monday denounced the attack, which took place on Friday, by extremist Hutus.
UN suspends talks with Burundi rebels
Zambian and Angolan interior ministers on Tuesday were holding talks to try to clear obstacles in the way of allowing about 40 000 refugees from Angola to return home, an official said. Zambia is sheltering close to 200 000 Angolan refugees, the highest number of Angolans living outside their country.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday it has received less than half the money required to feed 27 000 refugees from the Central African Republic in Chad and warned it will stop assisting them at the end of July unless it receives fresh funds urgently.
Anthony Tamba is helping to rebuild his brother’s house on the outskirts of Tubmanburg, a provincial town 60km north of the Liberian capital, Monrovia. He and his family were tired of living in one of the many camps for internally displaced persons on the edge of Monrovia, so they decided to start moving home instead of waiting for the launch of the government’s community resettlement programme.
Nearly 200 000 terrified Sudanese villagers have sought sanctuary in one of the most inhospitable areas on Earth, the deserts of Chad. They are some of the more than one million people chased from their homes in the past 16 months in what humanitarian workers call a systematic campaign of terror in Sudan’s Darfur region.
The day before United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan arrived, there had been as many as 4 000 people living in makeshift shelters in the patch of grubby sand between the fast-flowing river and the row of tiny headstones which mark the cemetery at Meshtel, in North Darfur. But in the middle of the night, that number had been reduced to zero.