The international community must provide 680 million US dollar (4,2 milliarder DKR) in aid for Congo this year to stop a humanitarian disaster that kills as many people as the 2004 Asian tsunami every six months, a top UN official has said according to alertnet.org.
The UN and the European Commission jointly launched this appeal on Monday at a conference in Brussels, two months before the DR Congo is due to hold landmark elections, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland said.
– Too few leaders understand that four million people have died and many more can die unless we put it right, Egeland said in an interview. The current daily death rate of 1.200 people was equivalent to a tsunami “every six months, year after year after year,” he added.
In what some experts call the deadliest humanitarian crisis of the last 60 years, an estimated four million people have died in Congo, mostly from hunger and disease, since civil war began in 1998. It ended officially in 2003, but deaths continue.
Egeland said the UN had so far struggled to get resources because the sprawling central African state was seen as a hopeless case.
In 2005, the world body received 125 million dollar for Congo, half of what it sought and just one-tenth of what it received for the Asian tsunami. NGOs brought in another 125 million dollar, he said.
Speakers at a conference in Brussels, including EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel and Congolese Planning Minister Alexis Thambwe Mwamba, stressed the enormity of the problems facing the country.
These include an almost complete breakdown of the health system, absence of transport infrastructure, and endemic violence, especially sexual violence against women and children.
The UN humanitarian coordinator based in Kinshasa, Ross Mountain, urged the world to pay more attention to the relentless death toll. – They die, alas, in silence. They do not die in front of TV cameras, therefore it is very hard to dramatise. They die, nonetheless, he said.
