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DR Congo

U.S.Contributes More Aid to Great Lakes Region

(Funds issued to UNHCR)
WASHINGTON -- The United States is contributing additional funding to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for relief in the Great Lakes region, John Dinger, the acting State Department spokesman, announced May 30.

Following is the text of Dinger's statement:

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The United States is contributing additional funding in the amount of $12.6 million to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in response to the 1997 United Nations Consolidated Inter-agency Appeal for the Great Lakes Emergency, bringing the total contributed this year to $25.6 million.

The United States remains deeply concerned about the fate of refugees and recent returnees in the Great Lakes countries, particularly in the light of numerous reports of serious human rights abuses against refugees and other civilians.

We support the outstanding efforts of UNHCR to care for these victims of conflict, often under very difficult and dangerous circumstances, and call for full and free access for humanitarian workers to refugees throughout the region.

While over 1.3 million refugees in the Great Lakes region of Africa have returned to their countries since the end of 1996, UNHCR continues to care for tens of thousands of others in the countries of the Great Lakes region who have been unable to return home or who have fled new outbreaks of civil war.

The emergency relief effort to find, care for, and repatriate to Rwanda those refugees who remain in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues and is placing a heavy burden on UNHCR's financial and human resources.

In Tanzania, UNHCR cares for 280,000 Burundi refugees and 100,000 Zairian refugees. In Burundi, it is monitoring the well-being of over 90,000 refugees who returned from the DROC [Democratic Republic of Congo] when their camps were overrun by alliance forces. In Uganda it is providing assistance to newly arrived refugees, including 8,000 Rwandans who had to leave Tanzania and 21,000 Zairian refugees who are prevented from returning home because of continued insecurity.

This $12.6 million comes from the State Department's migration and refugee assistance appropriation. The United States has contributed over one billion [one thousand million] dollars for humanitarian assistance in the Great Lakes region since late 1993.