For the second time this week, the United Nations refugee agency today warned more than 2,000 Congolese in Burundi not to return to the strife-torn east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which they fled during ethnic fighting in 2004.

The latest warning from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) follows an incident yesterday when more than 400 Congolese from the recently closed camp in Gihinga, central Burundi, were stopped from entering their country by DRC immigration officials.

“UNHCR has repeatedly urged the refugees not to go back to their native South Kivu province in DRC for the moment, stressing that that under the prevailing security conditions neither the Government authorities nor UNHCR would be in a position to guarantee their safety on return,” agency spokesperson Andrej Mahecic told a news briefing in Geneva.

DRC immigration services said their actions were based on security concerns for the group. The refugees had boarded 11 trucks provided by Burundian government yesterday morning, leaving behind another group of some 500 refugees waiting for their turn to go home. When they reached the border they found it closed and the Burundian authorities took them back to Gihinga.

Read more – http://www0.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32486&Cr=democratic&Cr1=congo

5 October 2009 – The United Nations refugee agency today warned more than 2,000 Congolese sheltering in Burundi against returning to their homes in conflict-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The Congolese refugees from a region of South Kivu province which borders with Burundi have refused to relocate to a newly established camp further east and decided instead to return west to the Uvira region of South Kivu, their homeland.

For months, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Burundian authorities have led an intensive information campaign to prepare the refugees for voluntary relocation, part of a consolidation exercise involving the closure of the makeshift camp housing this particular group of Congolese until last week.

Read more – http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32425&Cr=Democratic&Cr1=congo

Michael Mann has stated in ‘The Dark Side of Democracy’ (2003) that ethnic and religious conflicts continue to simmer around the world and the death toll in the 20th century for them is somewhere over 70 million. Above 80% of people killed in wars during the 90s were civilians in civil wars, mostly ethnic in nature, which have taken over from interstate or conventional ideology based wars. Displacement, bloodshed and a very convoluted conflict are not new to Congo, which continues to reverberate from the violent aftershocks of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. After Hutu death squads exterminated hundreds of thousands of Tutsi in Rwanda, only to be stopped by the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s take over of the country in July the same year, many killers fled into eastern Congo in what became known as the Great Lakes refugee crisis. The Hutu militias have regrouped, and United Nations officials blame them for terrorizing civilians, especially women, although they claim to have no part in these atrocities (Gettlemen. J, 2007). Read more…