UNHCR resettles refugees in DRC

More than 3,000 Angolan refugees who fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) south-western border town of Kidompolo had by Friday been moved to more secure areas inland, according to UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski. “In the transfer operation, which ended on Friday, the refugees were taken to Congolese villages south of the capital, Kinshasa. The refugees are part of a group of nearly 10,000 Angolan refugees who had fled to the DRC in early August in the wake of a UNITA offensive on the northern Angolan town of Beu. The last group of refugees left Kidompolo on Friday morning on foot, at the start of a two-day journey to the settlement villages of Zomfi, Zulu and Sadi, some 50 km from the DRC/Angola frontier,” Janowski said during a press briefing in Geneva on Tuesday. He said extremely poor road conditions had forced the majority of the refugees to walk from their border encampments to their new locations, but that the sick, young, old and disabled were transported by truck. According to Janowski, each refugee family had been allocated half a hectare of land. He said UNHCR and its partners would provide seeds, tools and other aid to the refugees over the next several months. Future support would, however, be community-based and would focus mainly on health and education facilities in localities where refugees have settled. Janowski said an estimated 4,000 Angolan refugees who arrived in the DRC during August still remained in other border areas - 2,000 in the town of Kimvula and a similar number scattered across several other villages. More than 2,000 others had returned on their own to their homes in areas around the town of Maquela do Zombo, in northern Angola. Before the recent influx, the DRC was hosting over 180,000 Angolan refugees. UNHCR is assisting over 70,000 of them in the Bas-Congo and Katanga provinces.