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Congo violence has displaced thousands - UN
Real estate news By Independent Online
October 24 2007 at 04:02PM
Kinshasa - The latest clashes in the Democratic Republic of Congo have driven 33 000 more people from villages in Nord-Kivu province and a cholera outbreak is suspected, UN agencies reported on Wednesday. About 25 000 people have been uprooted in the rugged Rutshuru highlands about 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of the provincial capital Goma and 8 000 others have fled over the border into Uganda, UN officials estimated.
However, the battlefronts have calmed down and relief agencies plan to try to distribute drinking water on Thursday to people in the Rutshuru area, Louis Vigneault, the Goma spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told AFP. Relief work on the Ugandan side of the border has started and the local authorities and UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) urged displaced people to gather at the Nyakabanda centre, 15 kilometres from the border, the UNHCR said in a statement.
At Bunagana, a settlement on the border, officials had noted two cases of suspected cholera, a fast-spreading water-borne disease, leading the HCR to urge people to move out of the zone to the "transit centre with adequate health facilities." HCR workers and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF - Doctors without Borders) at Nyankabanda have finished building "seven collective shelters for 1 500 people". MSF staff were vaccinating children under five and the UN Children's Fund provided two 10 000-litre fresh water tanks. The fighting pits the regular army against renegade troops loyal to a dissident ex-general, Laurent Nkunda, who has set himself as a warlord in tracts of Nord-Kivu and claims to be protecting the minority Tutsi population.
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