THE EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, Ms Emma Bonino, yesterday made an emotional appeal to the international community to live up to its responsibilities in the face of a deliberately ignored human catastrophe in eastern Zaire.
Ms Bonino, who had just returned from a visit to the camp of Kisangani, deep inside Zaire, said she felt she had "just come back from hell" and described conditions "beneath any conceivable standard of human dignity ... that posed a real challenge to the credibility of the United Nations".
Children "like skeletons", she said, wandered a camp of 200,000 people "who allegedly do not exist". The conditions were appalling, with little water or food, temperatures constantly above 35C, and a road access that was impassable to heavy lorries. In the forests there were almost certainly another 200,000.
In December when those responsible for sending a multinational force to the region decided it was no longer needed, it had been on the basis that the refugees had all returned to Rwanda, the commissioner said.
The humanitarian organisations had then disputed that contention, "but everyone was happy to look elsewhere". It was inconceivable, however, Ms Bonino said, that the most powerful military forces in the world, which had at their disposal highly advanced technological capabilities, did not know that at Kisangani there were now 200,000 people.
She paid tribute to the work of the few NGOs struggling to bring relief and pledged that the EU's humanitarian arm would do what it could to restore the access road. But others must assume their responsibility, too, she said, castigating the US ambassador to Kigali, who, the commissioner said, had urged the EU "not to feed those genocidal killers".
Such comments were unworthy of an important country, Ms Bonino said, urging such "armchair diplomats" to go to the camps and say such things directly to those starving children.
Zaire is expected to raise the issue this week at the UN Security Council.
. France said yesterday it could not support a plan for three African states to help Kinshasa fight rebels in eastern Zaire because of an EU embargo on military aid to the region.
