Central African Republic faces disaster: UN

Geneva, Apr 5: The Central African Republic faces a mounting humanitarian disaster, with the lives of a quarter of its people disrupted by civil and regional warfare, the United Nations children agency said.

UNICEF said the north of the country, along the border with Sudan and Chad, is engulfed in a growing conflict between government forces and various rebel groups.

''The situation is critical. There is a real humanitarian disaster in the making,'' the agency's chief representative in the republic, Mahimbo Mdoe, told a news conference yesterday.

Studies indicated that some 15 per cent of the adult female population in the north of the Central African Republic have been raped, contributing to a surge in HIV/AIDS.

Young boys are increasingly being recruited into fighting forces, while overall some 450 children die each week across the republic's northern region from malnutrition and preventable disease, Mdoe said.

But a UN appeal to richer nations for nearly 12 million dollars to help 2007 relief operations in the country, among the world's poorest, had so far yielded only 2.5 million dollars.

Last week, the Republic's prime minister, Elie Dote, told Reuters the government planned to issue a bond on a new regional bourse later this year to raise funds to boost the ailing economy and help curb insecurity.

Mdoe said more than 1 million people out of a total national population of just under 4 million were affected by the fighting, the product of national problems but also a spinoff from Sudan's Darfur crisis.

Figures issued by UNICEF, which focuses on helping children but also plays a wider humanitarian role in poorer countries, showed that nearly 300,000 people have been driven from their homes in the conflict.

Of these, 212,000 are in temporary shelter inside the Republic while some 70,000 more have fled across borders into Chad and Sudan, despite similar fighting in both between government and insurgent groups, and into Cameroon.

Reuters