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UN Official Warns of Potential Massacre

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
NEWS
October 24, 2002
Posted to the web October 24, 2002
Nairobi
A senior UN official said on Wednesday that unless the international community
acted to forestall the incitement of ethnic hatred in the eastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo, the country would face "a massacre of horrific
proportions".
The UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, Carolyn McAskie, was speaking to
reporters at UN headquarters in New York about her visit last week to eastern
Congo. She said the messages of ethnic hatred coming from the region were
familiar. "We have heard them before," she said.
While the recent withdrawal of foreign troops from the country would lead to
peace in the long run, she said, their departure had exposed a number of
ongoing internal conflicts that could continue to fuel humanitarian crises in
the region.
In addition to the ongoing fighting, she said that one-third of the country's
48 million population had "critical" food needs, while 64 percent of people in
the east were undernourished, and 41 percent of children under five years old
were malnourished.
Despite the country's huge stores of natural resources, she said, it ranked
152nd out of 174 countries on the UN's Human Development Index. About 330,000
Congolese refugees were also currently living in neighbouring Republic of
Congo, Tanzania, and Zambia.
It was not a question of just one crisis, McAskie said, there were "a series of
humanitarian crises" in the country.

   

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