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CENTRAL AND EASTERN AFRICA
IRIN-CEA Weekly Round-Up 300
8 - 14 October 2005


CONTENTS:

UGANDA: Army to hunt LRA rebels inside Sudan
UGANDA: WFP appeals for more resources to feed IDPs
BURUNDI: 3,000 Rwandans seek refuge in the north
BURUNDI: Rwasa expelled as FNL leader
DRC: 170,000 get clean drinking water
DRC: Rebels attack villages, kill 24, displace thousands
DRC-TANZANIA: Repatriation of Congolese refugees begins
TANZANIA: Zanzibar police shoot at crowd, 18 wounded
KENYA: UNICEF appeals for funds for children in drought-hit areas
CAR: Mission to flood-affected areas planned, official says
CAR: Repatriation of Sudanese refugees to begin shortly, UNHCR says


UGANDA: Army to hunt LRA rebels inside Sudan

Sudan has authorised the Ugandan army to hunt down the Lord's Resistance
Army (LRA) rebels wherever they hide in Sudan, an army spokesman said on
Tuesday.

Sudan also assured Uganda it and the southern Sudan People's Liberation
Army would help hunt down the LRA, Ugandan deputy army spokesman Maj
Felix Kuraije said.

An agreement to this effect was signed in the Sudanese capital,
Khartoum, on 7 October, he added. Ugandan and Sudanese military
officials along with former SPLA rebel fighters would meet in Juba on
Wednesday to discuss joint anti-LRA operations.

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49470]


UGANDA: WFP appeals for more resources to feed IDPs

At least 1.45 million people displaced by conflict in northern Uganda
could experience severe food shortages unless the World Food Programme
(WFP) receives fresh donations to sustain its operations in the region
beyond December, an official of the UN agency said.

"We spend US $8 million per month to feed more than 1.45 million
internally displaced people [IDPs] in northern Uganda," Ken Davies, the
WFP country director in Uganda, said on Wednesday.

WFP said in a separate statement that it needed $58 million to buy food
locally to feed almost the entire population of northern Uganda, who had
been driven out of their homes by frequent attacks by the LRA. [Full
story on: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49503 ]


BURUNDI: 3,000 Rwandans seek refuge in the north

At least 3,000 Rwandans, who earlier this year sought asylum in Burundi
but were repatriated, have returned to the northern provinces of Kirundo
and Ngozi where they are awaiting the government's ruling on their
status, UNHCR Public Relations Officer Catherine Lune-Grayson said on
Wednesday in Bujumbura, the Burundi capital.

An official in charge of refugees in the Ministry of the Interior, Col
Didace Nzikoruriho, told IRIN that a team of lawyers, as well as refugee
and human rights experts would be recruited to define the status of the
Rwandans.

"If we find they are refugees, they will be treated as such, if not,
they will be treated accordingly," he added.

Nzikoruriho said the government was preparing a bill on asylum seekers
and the protection of refugees. If parliament adopted such a bill, he
said, the law would allow the government to set up a permanent
secretariat on refugees.

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49522]


BURUNDI: Rwasa expelled as FNL leader

Agathon Rwasa, leader of Burundi's remaining rebel group, the Forces
nationales de liberation (FNL), has been expelled from the movement's
leadership, a new FNL spokesman announced on Tuesday.

The new spokesman, Sylvestre Niyungeko, who replaces Pasteur Habimana,
told a local radio that Jean Bosco Sindayigaya had replaced Rwasa as the
new FNL leader.

Niyungeko said 29 FNL founding members and 93 other members decided
Rwasa's removal at the National Council meeting on 8 October at Muyira,
Bujumbura Rural Province. This follows the signing of a letter, by the
same group, in September, calling on Rwasa to convene a national
congress to determine the movement's direction, given the political
changes in the country.

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49494]


DRC: 170,000 get clean drinking water

A French humanitarian aid association, Solidarites, launched on
Wednesday a $3-million drinking water distribution network for 170,000
people in the town of Beni, in North Kivu Province of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC).

A Solidarites delegation from Paris, led by General Manager Alain
Boinet, handed over the project to local authorities during the ceremony
at Beni, a town of some 176,000 people.

Work on the project started in 2003. A team of hydraulic engineers from
Solidarites received the support of volunteer experts from Aquassitance,
a French NGO specialising in water provision, waste disposal and the
environment; and utilised a design office's expertise for the technical
conception.

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49495]


DRC: Rebels attack villages, kill 24, displace thousands

Thousands of civilians began arriving in the town of Walungu in eastern
DRC on Monday following attacks on four nearby villages, in which at
least 24 civilians were hacked to death.

"Most of the displaced are small children and old women," Donatien
Nakalonge, a local community leader in the town of Walungu in South Kivu
Province, told IRIN on Tuesday.

They walked 15 km from their villages of Tchindudi, Mungombe, Kanyola
and Rudundu, in a valley 60 km south of the provincial capital, Bukavu.

The spokesman for the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC), Kemal Saiki, said
on Monday that a UN team had, so far, visited two of the villages and
confirmed that 15 people had been killed, including six children. [Full
story on: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49475 ]


DRC-TANZANIA: Repatriation of Congolese refugees begins

The repatriation of Congolese refugees who have been living in camps in
western Tanzania began on Wednesday with the first batch of 282 leaving
for the DRC, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has announced.

It said the returnees were taken to Baraka in the DRC, which is home for
most of those in the convoy. UNHCR said a few were from Uvira [South
Kivu Province], who will be sent there by bus to their homes.

Tanzanian government officials, UNHCR staff and those from NGOs
operating in refugee camps accompanied the Congolese on their return
home. UNHCR said the repatriation was for those who had voluntarily
opted to go home. Besides the returnees, UNHCR said, there were 15
representatives of the remaining refugees who were going to DRC on what
it termed a "go and see" visit.

UNHCR said at least 150,000 Congolese refugees were still in Tanzanian
camps and that Wednesday's repatriation was "a test convoy".

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49531]


TANZANIA: Zanzibar police shoot at crowd, 18 wounded

At least 18 supporters of the main opposition party in Tanzania's
semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar were wounded on Sunday after police
opened fire on a crowd.

"I heard the gunshots," said Salma Mohammed, a Zanzibar-based reporter
covering the political campaign there ahead of 30 October elections.

She and other witnesses said riot police, known as the Field Force Unit,
fired bullets and tear gas canisters into the crowd at the town of Donge
30 km north of Zanzibar's capital, Stone Town.

The confrontation occurred after supporters of the opposition Civic
United Front party attempted to hold a campaign rally that authorities
had cancelled in the last moment.

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49441]


KENYA: UNICEF appeals for funds for children in drought-hit areas

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has appealed for $4 million to help tens
of thousands of children who are either malnourished or at risk of
malnutrition in drought-affected districts of Kenya.

Some of the required funds would finance an ongoing polio immunisation
campaign made necessary by the recent outbreak of the crippling disease
in Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, which border Kenya, Sara Cameron, the
UNICEF-Kenya communications officer, said on Wednesday in Nairobi, the
Kenyan capital.

Working with the government and other organisations, UNICEF-supported
assessments had shown that at least one-quarter of children in the
northeastern district of Mandera, and more than one in every five
children in the vast northern district of Turkana, were acutely
malnourished.

"We need resources now to provide urgent assistance to 21,000 children
facing malnutrition, immunise almost a million vulnerable children
against polio and provide water to 100,000 people in critical need,"
Heimo Laakkonen, UNICEF's country representative in Kenya, said in a
statement.

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49497]


CAR: Mission to flood-affected areas planned, official says

The government of the Central African Republic (CAR) may send a mission
to flood affected areas outside the capital, Bangui, to assess the
agricultural damage caused by floods that swept parts of the country in
August, a government official has said.

"We are going to get in touch with the Red Cross to get their report in
order to plan a mission into the [affected] zones," M'Peco Etienne, the
director of planning in the Ministry of Agriculture, said on Thursday.

He said the government did not have a clear picture of the impact of the
floods, especially in the central province of Ouaka, where farms were
reported still inundated.

"We don't have the map of high risk zones in the country," he said. "We
have no information about farms flooded by rain water in the towns of
Bambari, Kouango, Grimari and Bakala as reported by the National Red
Cross Committee".

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49548]


CAR: Repatriation of Sudanese refugees to begin shortly, UNHCR says

Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees in CAR will be repatriated
towards the end of October or in November, UNHCR Representative Bruno
Geddo said on Tuesday.

"There are currently 20,000 Sudanese refugees in the CAR and the UNHCR
office is still making the list of those who are willing to go back
home," he said at a news conference in the capital, Bangui.

He said the date on which the repatriation would begin depended on the
signing of a tripartite agreement by the CAR, Sudan and the UNHCR.

[Full story on:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=49502]


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Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
2005


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