Interlinked conflicts cause critical refugee problems

The Great Lakes region is one “in which refugee problems have been particularly critical”, with the extremely complex pattern of the DRC conflict creating “a fertile environment for the outbreak of smaller, violent sub-conflicts, likely to cause further population movements,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata said in a statement on Tuesday. Situations in which it had “little or no presence”, such as parts of DRC, were particularly worrying for UNHCR, given that its core mandate was “the protection of refugees and the search for solutions to their problems,” she added. Central African conflicts continued to be connected and interlinked, not only due to their geographical proximity, but also through coalitions of defeated or disbanded armed groups, often complicating the protection task by moving along with refugees, Ogata told a meeting of UNHCR’s executive committee. Refugee flows from the DRC conflict into Gabon and the Central African Republic marked “a progressive widening of the spiral of refugee crises” and - in spite of the Lusaka Agreement - UNHCR was concerned at the possibility of fresh and sudden refugee movements in DRC, the Republic of Congo and Burundi, she added.