Congolese refugees at border camps await transfer inland

Thousands of Congolese refugees living in border transit camps in Burundi's northwestern province of Cibitoke are due to be moved further inland "soon", an official of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told IRIN on Thursday. The UNHCR emergency officer in northwestern Burundi, Christine Neveu, said the refugees, who fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC) eastern province of South Kivu in June following fighting there, are to be transferred to a site in Burundi's southeastern province of Rutana. The refugees are currently in transit centres in the Rugombo, Gatumba and Cibitoke areas, all in Cibitoke Province. On 22 June, the UNHCR estimated that 31,000 Congolese had taken refuge in the camps. Plans to move the refugees inland follow a request by Burundian authorities to UNHCR to move the camps for security reasons, as well as a general lack of space for the expansion of the camps. Neveu said a UNHCR mission had been dispatched at the end of June to inspect five potential camp sites proposed by the Burundian government. From the sites surveyed, a plot in the province of Rutana had been deemed suitable, she added. The refugee agency has officially requested the Burundian government to allocate it the Rutana site, but it has yet to get the approval of the Burundian authorities. Neveu said that so far the response from the international community had been positive, but there would still be a need for additional funding when the new site was secured for development. She said transfers should begin by next week for some 1,200 refugees from the Gatumba camp to an existing UNHCR site in Gasorwe, Muyinga Province. On 6 July, UNHCR reported that hundreds of the Congolese refugees had started to go home by their own means. "At this point, UNHCR is not facilitating any returns," Neveu had said, pointing to the still uneasy security situation in eastern DRC.