"We want to go home," Katanga's displaced tell Egeland

A representative of thousands of people displaced by fighting in the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga Province told Jan Egeland, the visiting United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, they wanted to return home.

"We have suffered so much for more than a year that we are now willing to return home even if not all the Mai-Mai fighters there have disarmed and the situation is still dangerous," Jean-Venance Mwamba, the head of Kolomani displaced camp, told Egeland on Wednesday.

Egeland was visiting a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kankonona, 500 km northeast of Lubumbashi, capital of Katanga.

Mwamba represented 1,362 displaced people who had fled to Kolomani Camp in the village of Kankonona in Pweto Territory. He said they came from the village of Mwenga, 75 km farther north, after it had been pillaged and burned by Mai-Mai militiamen and government troops, who have been trying to disarm all illegal combatants in the province.

Mwamba said living in Mwenga would have to be better than at the camp, one of many remote areas in central Katanga where about 150,000 people have been displaced by fighting between the Mai-Mai and the army since November 2004.

Relief organisations have recorded high levels of malnutrition and mortality in the camps and are struggling to provide aid.

Mwamba said people in Kolomani had no right to farm the land and did not have fishing material. Children had not gone to school for the past year and the Mai-Mai and the army were harassing them just as they had done in their villages.

Egeland, who is on an eight-day, three-nation visit to Africa, said he would try to help the displaced population.

Egeland among newly demobilised Mai-Mai combatants.

He also met newly demobilised Mai-Mai combatants who, he said, were not getting the aid they needed from the government. "It is important that all the combatants are disarmed, demobilised and reinserted [into the community] to end the war once and for all," Egeland said.

Fidèle Ntumi, a Mai-Mai leader who met Egeland, said: "We’ve been here for two weeks, but we haven’t received anything like the other disarmed persons. We don’t have anything to eat. We are not prisoners but people who have voluntarily surrendered their weapons."

Egeland said the government's commission for demobilisation and reinsertion, known as CONADER, needed to get working. CONADER is being restructured and did not have enough money, the commission's spokesman, Atufuka Mbuze, said.

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