RWANDA-POPULATION: WFP Sends More Food To Feed Refugees

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Apr 1 1996 (IPS) - The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is set to deliver 22,940 metric tonnes of U.S. maize to feed some 2.4 million Rwandese refugees in Zaire, Burundi and Tanzania.

“The beneficiaries will include a smaller caseload of Rwandese and Burundians who reside in their own countries,” said Brenda Burton, WFP’s information officer here.

The first batch of 11,470 metric tonnes of emergency food is expected to land at the Kenyan port of Mombasa this week. It will be split between the Zairean towns of Bukavu (3,000mt) and Goma (6,970mt) that host more than one million Rwandese refugees, with (1,500 mt) destined for Rwanda.

The second consignment from the United States, also due this week, will be off-loaded in Dar es Salaam where it will go to feed the 750,000 refugees from Rwanda and Burundi in the north of the country.

Last month the UN agency appealed for an additional 155 million dollars to continue providing relief assistance to some 2.4 million Rwandese and Burundian refugees, returnees and internally displaced people who had fled the political and ethnic turmoil in the two central African countries.

So far only the United States has responded by pledging some 100,000 tonnes out of a total requirement for 1996 of 358,000 tonnes, according to the WFP.

In Rwanda, while pockets of vulnerable people continue to require emergency assistance, over 65 percent of WFP activities will be aimed at repairing the war-shattered infrastructure and promoting agricultural recovery in a country laid waste by genocide and civil war in 1994 which claimed an estimated one million lives.

“Everything is being done to bring the food deficit to a minimum by the end of the first half of 1996,” Dr Sam Kanyarukiga, advisor on agriculture to Rwandese President Pasteur Bizimungu told IPS. “There has been a positive response from the population to the government’s appeal to resume farming.”

But although Rwanda is hoping for a 24 percent increase in its agricultural production this year, the projected harvest is not enough to feed its 6.6 million people.

More hands are needed to bring the land back into cultivation, but the Hutu refugees in Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi are only slowly answering government appeals to return, terrified they will be held accountable for the genocide which targeted minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.

Col. Frank Mugambage, attached to the president’s office, accuses the defeated army of the former Hutu-dominated government of preventing Rwandese refugees from returning home to help in food production.

“Those people…scared away refugees in 1994 and are still holding them at bay,” he said. “The majority of (refugees) are innocent people who either were manipulated or coerced to flee the country.”

Last year some 200,000 refugees, including those forcibly expelled by the Zairean authorities, returned to Rwanda and Burundi. Although repatriation in the last quarter of 1995 fell far short of expectations, WFP and other agencies are optimistic that a significant number of refugees will return in 1996.

“Voluntary repatriation is a priority for the refugee assistance programme,” said Yohannes Mengesha, WFP Regional Manager for East and Central Africa.

WFP plans to assist returnees to Rwanda and Burundi with food packages at transit centres, each receiving a two-month supply. The food required will be diverted from regional refugee feeding programmes as people go home.

To ensure that relief supplies reaches distribution sites, WFP plans to rehabilitate roads, ports and railways in Burundi, Zaire, Uganda and Tanzania at an estimated cost of 7.9 million dollars.

The international community has pumped in considerable amounts of money to feed the refugee populations of Rwanda and Burundi.

For example, during the nine months of April to December 1994 following Rwanda’s civil war, international assistance for emergency relief to refugees and displaced persons is estimated to have cost in the order of 1.4 billion dollars, according to Henning Kjeldgaard, the Danish Ambassador to Kenya.

In 1995, donor contributions helped the WFP feed three million Rwandese and Burundian refugees and internally displaced people who needed more than 50,000 tonnes of emergency food each month at a daily estimated cost of one million dollars.