Heads of three UN aid agencies on Sunday started a joint tour of
Africa's Great Lakes region, designed to highlight its refugee
crisis.
According to a joint statement, the heads of UNICEF, the World
Food Program (WFP) and the refugee agency UNHCR, on Sunday started
their tour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
They are calling for greater assistance from the international
community, said the statement.
The DRC's recent war cost 4 million lives and about 1.6 million
people are still refugees.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, WFP
Executive Director James Morris and UN Children's Fund (UNICEF)
Executive Director Ann Veneman will go on to visit Rwanda and
Burundi, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in civil
wars in the early 1990s, it added.
"We hope their unprecedented mission to this neglected region
will help re-focus international attention on the suffering of
millions of refugees, internally displaced persons and returnees,"
the statement said.
"All three agencies are under-funded for their work in the Great
Lakes region, which is just emerging from a tempest of conflicts
that forced millions to flee in the 1990s," it said.
(Xinhua News Agency February 27, 2006)
