Congolese refugees going home, UN agency says

Hundreds of Congolese refugees are returning home from Burundi with "mixed feelings" about the security situation in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Tuesday. Between 100 and 200 refugees had gone home daily since Saturday, the agency reported. Most of the returnees had been living in villages outside the UNHCR's three border camps in Burundi's northwestern province of Cibitoke. UNHCR estimated that 34,000 Congolese refugees had arrived in the Burundian camps since early June. International NGOs have been providing them with food and non-food aid. The NGOs include CARE, which has been distributing UN World Food Programme rations to the refugees, and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which has been providing medical treatment. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is currently conducting a survey to identify unaccompanied minors within the camps; results are expected by the end of the week. UNHCR reported that most of the returnees were women and school students. Many were leaving their families in the camps to verify the situation back home. The agency added that students were also returning to the DRC take their final school exams. At the same time, UNHCR said, the authorities in eastern DRC were applying pressure on refugees to return. It reported that the central government in the capital, Kinshasa, had reportedly asked the authorities in Uvira and Kamanyola, both in South Kivu Province, to threaten to fill posts held by refugees, especially in the cases of government employees and school headmasters, if they did not return soon. The refugees fled to Burundi in early June following an outbreak of fighting between loyalist and dissident army troops. The violence resulted in an occupation from 26 May to 8 June of the South Kivu provincial capital of Bukavu by dissidents led by Gen Laurent Nkunda and Col Jules Mutebutsi. Loyalist troops re-entered the town on 9 June, but a wave of instability spread across the whole province following the Bukavu seizure. The subsequent insecurity caused several humanitarian actors and NGOs to suspend or reduce their humanitarian operations in the region, but they have since begun to return. In early July, IRC resumed its health, sanitation and water services, whose suspension had affected some 514,000 people. The UN Mission in the DRC, known by its French acronym MONUC, estimated that there were currently about 20,000 government troops in the region. The Kinshasa government had said the troop deployments were intended to restore order and government authority in eastern DRC.