Relief aid for thousands in Bukavu

A relief aid programme for victims of recent fighting in Bukavu, the capital of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's South Kivu Province, was completed on Wednesday, said an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representative, Anna Schaaf. She told IRIN that since Saturday, the ICRC had distributed kits to 3,100 families, each kit containing enough blankets, kitchen utensils, clothes and soap for five people. The town's neediest residents had received the kits, said Schaaf, "without regard to religious or ethnic affiliations". Many people in Bukavu had their possessions looted in May and June when dissident government troops led by Col Jules Mutebutsi and Gen Laurent Nkunda seized the town. The dissident troops said they had come to protect Congolese Tutsis, known as Banyamulenge, from being massacred. Since the end of June, the ICRC has also distributed kits to families in the east of the country in Punia, Kailo and Pangi in Maniema Province. The ICRC has been working in cooperation with the DRC Red Cross Society and local authorities. It has also been reuniting children with their families, most of whom had remained separated since in 1996 when fighting first broke out in the east of the country. The youngest was a one-year-old girl, who, together with her 16-year-old mother, also an unaccompanied minor, is soon to be reunited with their family in Mbandaka, Equateur Province.