6,000 people in northwest need aid urgently - Red Cross

Close to 6,000 residents of the northwestern Central African Republic (CAR) town of Bossembele, who fled recent fighting between government troops and rebels, are direly in need relief aid, CAR Red Cross Secretary-General Patrice Yagenga said. "About 30 homes were burnt and 80 percent of about 7,000 Bossembele's inhabitants are still in the bush," he told IRIN in Bangui on Saturday. He added that due to fear they had still not returned to their town, which lies 157 km northwest of the capital, Bangui. Government troops, backed by rebel fighters of Jean-Pierre Bemba's Mouvement de liberation du Congo (MLC), expelled the CAR rebels loyal to the renegade general, Francois Bozize, from Bossembele last week. The CAR Red Cross made a three-hour assessment visit of Bossembele, during which it distributed blankets and household goods to the victims, but in inadequate quantities. Yazenga said the Red Cross had appealed to donors for these items as well as for food and tents. The World Food Programme (WFP) has said the lack of security in the area precluded a complete assessment of needs for the town's residents. "We cannot go beyond PK 22 [22 km northeast of Bangui]," Albert Bango-Makoudou, the WFP programme officer, said on Friday. Meanwhile, a national rape crisis team set up to care for those who suffered during the fighting between government and rebel forces began work on 25 November, a month after the invasion of the capital. The team, comprising a gynaecologist, a woman lawyer, a psychologist and a communications expert, has started contacting national and international partners on behalf of the rape victims. Members of the Democratic Republic of the Congo-based MLC perpetrated most of the rapes. Although the extent of the rape cases is unknown, the chairman of the rape crisis committee, Sacko Wilibiro, said: "The first records, which are still provisional, reveal that 100 women were raped." They included 20 critical cases, which needed intensive care, he added. The "main difficulty" in obtaining an accurate figure of rape victims was, he said, that the victims, especially Muslim women, were refusing to disclose details their individual ordeals. The chairwoman of the National Bureau of Muslim Women, Hadidja Sarah Nimaga, said 30 of the 140 Chadian Muslim women who fled the fighting had been raped.