Increasing Violence in Congo Endangers Quarter Million

Ishasha - The UN refugee agency UNHCR has warned that disease could break out among thousands of refugees fleeing the violence in their east Congo villages and pouring across the border into Uganda.

A lack of clean drinking water and adequate toilets - common when large numbers of refugees are on the move - can lead rapidly to outbreaks of diseases like cholera, which has been reported around Goma, the provincial capital in recent months.

Outbreaks of bloodshed will continue to occur in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where in the past few months escalating conflict has uprooted a quarter of a million people, unless impunity is ended for those guilty of the worst violations, the top United Nations human rights official said today in Geneva.