Citation
NAIROBI, April 23 (Reuter) - The U.N. food agency WFP said it had
re-started relief work in southern Rwanda on Saturday to curb the
rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation there.
The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said it had also stepped up
deliveries of relief food to new Rwandan refugees in the neighbouring
countries of Zaire, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda.
A WFP statement in Nairobi said following an agreement on joint
cross-border operation between the WFP and the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC), WFP food delivered to the Rwanda-Burundi
border would be handed over to the ICRC for distribution to the
displaced in southern Rwanda.
It said the first truck of relief food for southern rwanda reached the
Rwanda-Burundi border on Friday for an estimated 150,000 people in the
Butare and Gutamare areas.
WFP is setting up a transport fleet of 22 long-haul trucks in Burundi
for the cross-border operation to ensure additional transport capacity
of 660 tonnes. The trucks will primarily be used to deliver food across
the border into Rwanda and Zaire.
It added that the WFP and other U.N. agencies, under the coordination
of the department of human affairs, had sent an assessment team to the
embattled capital Kigali to examine the possibility of starting
delivery and distribution of relief food to thousands of suffering
people trapped in Kigali.
The high-powered U.N. assessment mission in the tiny nation of eight
million people, which arrived on Saturday, is led by
Undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs Peter Hansen.
The WFP said it had mobilised 58,000 tonnes of food -- enough to meet
the demands of 1.2 million Rwandan and Burundian refugees in the region
for two months.
There are widespread shortages of food, drinkable water and medicines
in much of the country. The situation is especially critical in Kigali,
the epicentre of the current fighting where bodies are still lying in
the streets, creating danger of epidemics,
the WFP said.
The latest Rwanda fighting was triggered by the death on April 6 of
president Juvenal Habyarimana in rocket attack on his plane.
Rwandan refugees who have fled and sought refuge in Burundi had reached
15,000, more than double in just two days. The WFP said violence at one
border point had killed scores of people and forced others across the
frontier.
Since the fighting erupted in Rwanda, some 50,000 Burundians who had
sought refuge in southern Rwanda had since returned to their country
and were housed in transit camps, the WFP said.
In Zaire, the WFP said there were 45,000 new refugees in the last
month, in addition to 50,000 Burundians who fled to the area in October
1993, after the killing by renegade paratroops of Burundian President
Melchior Ndadaye.
Fresh Rwandan refugees in Tanzania were estimated by the WFP at 20,000,
bringing the total figure to about 80,000. The WFP added that some
5,000 new Rwandan refugees had entered Uganda.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
