Aid reaches Congolese refugees

Emergency aid has arrived for Congolese refugees in northwestern Burundi, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced on Friday. In a statement, the agency said some 34,000 Congolese refugees living in three Burundian border camps had received non-food and food items, including 15-day food rations, jerry cans, blankets, soap and other hygiene materials. The information assistant for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Burundi, Nteturuye Isidore, told IRIN on Monday that WFP had delivered 352 mt of food to the Congolese refugees last week, enabling those in all the three camps to receive 15-day food rations. A UNHCR protection officer, France Lau, told IRIN on Monday, that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UNHCR and other partners had begun a programme to identify unaccompanied minors within the camps. "We have been able to identify approximately 300 unaccompanied minors from the information that refugees have provided themselves, we must now conduct more thorough interviews to gather more accurate information," she said. UNHCR reported that Medecins Sans Frontieres had quarantined some 30 refugees to prevent a possible cholera outbreak. It said that as a precautionary measure, the UNHCR was expanding its water storage capacity in the camps by constructing additional tanks and installing more storage bladders. Work is underway to identify alternative sites so that the refugees could be moved away from the Democratic Republic of Congo border, the UNHCR said. On Friday, a UNHCR mission went to evaluate two expansion sites that the Burundian government had proposed. "The mission to the eastern regions of Cankuzo and Rutana has not yet returned, we expect them to be back in the next few days, so we are not yet in a position to announce whether or not the sites have been judged suitable," Bernard Ntwari, the UNHCR spokesman in Burundi, told IRIN on Monday.