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.
Kevin Kennedy, the outgoing acting United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan talks about the humanitarian situation in Darfur, the prospect of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people moving to southern Sudan after a peace agreement has been signed, and the United Nation’s key areas of concern in Sudan.
”The toll on children is most worrying,” says James Elder, communications officer for the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), about the situation in Darfur, western Sudan. He noted that; ”There are high levels of malnutrition, especially among children. Many of them have died of malnutrition, but it is difficult to get the number of those dead due to the lack of monitoring logistics.”
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Unless it gets more funding, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) will not meet its aim to provide food to thousands of Angolan refugees returning home this year, the organisation said on Thursday. ”The food component of the repatriation exercise is essential,” said James Morris, executive director of the WFP.
Rebel attacks in northern Uganda have forced more than 20 000 refugees to flee their camps in recent weeks, the United Nations refugee agency said Sunday. The rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army have been raiding four camps in Adjumani district to loot food, medicine and other goods since the beginning of April.
More than 100 Ethiopian refugees are missing after the boat they were sailing on to Yemen sank when it collided with another vessel in Somali territorial waters on March 20, a United Nations official said on Wednesday. ”The boat sank with 120 refugees aboard,” said the official.