Mounting refugee crisis

Zambia is facing a mounting refugee crisis as a result of continuing conflict in neighbouring Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but humanitarian agencies are being hamstrung by a funding shortfall, a senior UNHCR official said on Friday. Ilunga Ngandu, the UNHCR Regional Director for Operations in Southern Africa said at a media briefing in Lusaka that because of donor “aloofness”, UNHCR is being forced to plan a cutback in supplies to refugees in Zambia who are currently already lacking one food commodity out of four. UNHCR has salt, cooking oil and maize but has an “acute shortage” of beans needed for protein. With a US $150 million budget deficit, supplies of even the three commodities currently available would be exhausted by December, assuming the refugee population in the country does not increase. “Sorry to say such food shortages never occurred in Kosovo or East Timor,” Ngandu, on a familiariasation tour of the country, said. “We have complained about these shortages already together with WFP and yet we are being told to cut down on our expenses.” Refugees are crossing into Zambia at a rate of 100 to 150 a-day. The continued influx has forced UNHCR to open a new camp in the Northern Province town of Kala, 1,200 km from Lusaka. The camp is to accommodate mostly DRC refugees after the Mwange camp in Mporokoso reached its capacity of 25,000 people. Currently some 1,000 refugees are in Kala. Zambia is home to a total of 224,472 refugees. In Nangweshi, a camp in western Zambia near the Angolan border, the 10,414 Angolan refugees vastly outnumber the local population of 3,000, straining the areas existing infrastructure. Meanwhile, according to news reports, the DRC government has closed the Kashiba border along the frontier with Zambia’s northern Luapula Province. A local official told IRIN that tensions have been rising in the area due to an increase in banditry. Two weeks ago two Zambians were shot dead by suspected Congolese gunmen. “The latest incident was last week when an eight-year-old girl was shot dead, again by men suspected to be Congolese bandits whom we suspect were looking for food too,” the official said.