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Aid workers to relocate Congo frontline refugees
Thu Nov 13, 2008 6:29pm EST
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By Hereward Holland
GOMA, Congo (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of refugees at a frontline camp in eastern Congo will be urgently moved to prevent them being caught in crossfire between rebels and the army, aid officials said on Thursday.
More than 65,000 civilians who have fled weeks of fighting are camped at Kibati, a few kilometers south of combat lines between Tutsi rebels loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda and government troops.
The refugees, squatting in cramped, dirty conditions within sight of a live volcano, are among 250,000 civilians forced from their homes since a resurgence of fighting in late August in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province.
Artillery and machinegun battles near Kibati have disrupted aid distribution to the refugees and sent thousands streaming south toward the provincial capital Goma, 10 km (6 miles) away.
"We noticed these people might be in serious danger and the humanitarian community decided we should move them from there ... as soon as possible," Ibrahima Coly, head of the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) in North Kivu, told Reuters.
Relief agencies planned to truck civilians who agreed to go to a camp at Mugunga, 10 km (6 miles) west of Goma, he said, adding he hoped this could start in a week's time.
Refugees at Kibati said they lived in fear of attack.
"We're not safe in the camp ... we don't know who might come, it could be CNDP (Nkunda's National Congress for the Defense of the People rebels), it could be FARDC (Congolese army), but I also worry about thieves," said Norbert Alimasi Mwamba, carrying a sack filled with possessions on his head.
The U.N. has its largest peacekeeping force in the world, 17,000-strong, in Congo but U.N. peacekeepers have been unable to protect hundreds of thousands of uprooted civilians in North Kivu from killings, lootings and rape. Human rights groups say both rebels and government troops have committed abuses.
"What I heard from (U.N. peacekeepers) is that ... they don't have the capacity to protect people (in Kibati)," one aid worker, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.
Nkunda, who wants President Joseph Kabila to agree to talks on Congo's future, last month pushed an offensive by his battle-hardened guerrillas to the gates of Goma, attracting a wave of international attention to the North Kivu conflict.
He suspended the offensive by declaring a ceasefire.
FEAR OF CHOLERA EPIDEMIC
Aid officials say the fighting has created a "catastrophic" security and humanitarian situation, and the risk of a repeat of the kind of human devastation caused by a 1998-2003 war that killed several million in the former Belgian colony.
The World Health Organization said it was worried about a wider cholera epidemic developing in the Goma zone, where cases tripled between early October and early November, because of unsafe water, poor sanitation and weak health services. Continued...
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