UN official warns of potential massacre

A senior UN official said on Wednesday that unless the international community acted to forestall the incitement of ethnic hatred in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country would face "a massacre of horrific proportions".

The UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, Carolyn McAskie, was speaking to reporters at UN headquarters in New York about her visit last week to eastern Congo. She said the messages of ethnic hatred coming from the region were familiar. "We have heard them before," she said.

While the recent withdrawal of foreign troops from the country would lead to peace in the long run, she said, their departure had exposed a number of ongoing internal conflicts that could continue to fuel humanitarian crises in the region.

In addition to the ongoing fighting, she said that one-third of the country's 48 million population had "critical" food needs, while 64 percent of people in the east were undernourished, and 41 percent of children under five years old were malnourished.

Despite the country's huge stores of natural resources, she said, it ranked 152nd out of 174 countries on the UN's Human Development Index. About 330,000 Congolese refugees were also currently living in neighbouring Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Zambia.

It was not a question of just one crisis, McAskie said, there were "a series of humanitarian crises" in the country.