Katanga Province opening up to aid workers

A recent assessment undertaken by the Irish aid agency, GOAL, in the east of Katanga Province, southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has shown that displaced people who had fled from the area due to insecurity were recently beginning to come home. Officials at the United Nations Mission in the DRC also told IRIN that in the last week it had noted an increase in the numbers of returnees from Tanzania to Kalemie and its environs, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, but said it was impossible to monitor numbers. "People are literally coming naked out of the forests to local villages, with nothing to rebuild their lives," Caroline Hurley, an employee of GOAL, told IRIN. "Food security projects are the biggest need at the moment. The whole area is totally overgrown, most of the food has been destroyed," she said, adding that food used to be transported from Kalemie to the rest of the country. "Now there are no roads to transport the food, no seed and no tools," she said. "The water situation is terrible, any wells we saw had no clear water at all," she said, adding that scabies was "huge" in the villages. Shorter-term feeding programmes were vital in the region, as was basic repair to the roads to give local populations better access to emerging markets, she said. Describing the local economy as "almost nonexistent", she said just two shops selling cigarettes, rice, and water melons had reopened in the town of Manono, about 250 km southwest of Kalemie. "You could see there used to be a whole street of shops, which are all barred up and closed now. There's absolutely nothing there," she said. On Tuesday, GOAL Director John O'Shea called for aid agencies and donors to take advantage of the relative peace in the country to launch "a massive" humanitarian programme. "Now that there is a ceasefire of sorts in the DRC, the surviving civilian population needs huge levels of support as they try to rebuild their lives," he said. Berating Western media for ignoring the war in the country, despite the estimated three million people killed; he said, "It is bad enough that the rest of the world chose to ignore the suffering of these people for three years of war, but to continue to ignore them now that there is a possibility of an end to the hostilities would be to add insult to terrible injury."