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Some 10,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo have begun being voluntarily repatriated from the Central African Republic, a protection officer for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Thursday.
The UNHCR official, Bettina Gambert, said the refugees were being returned in groups of 100 every day, with the first group having left the Molangue Refugee Camp in CAR on Wednesday.
They were taken to the town of Libenge, in the DRC's northwestern Equateur Province. The refugees had fled there in 1998 during fighting between rebels and troops loyal to the government of the late President Laurent Kabila.
A UNHCR spokesman in Geneva, Ron Redmond, said at a news briefing on Tuesday that Equateur was now safe for the refugees and that UNCHR planned to repatriate 2,247 of them by the end of 2004.
The first batch will go back to Libenge and surrounding villages, the following clusters are to go to Gemena, which is farther east from the CAR border. The final groups will return to Mbandaka and Gbadolite, home of late President Mobutu Sese Seko.
Though the number of refugees being repatriated is relatively small, the operation faces various logistical difficulties: roads in the province are impassable or non-existent, and the province has exceptionally heavy rains.
The repatriation follows an agreement signed in June by UNHCR, the CAR and DRC.
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