A UN report earlier this month found some 13 million Congolese in need of humanitarian aid — twice as many as last year — and 7.7 million are facing severe food insecurity, which is an increase of 30 percent over 2017. The UN has categorized the situation there as a Level 3 crisis — the organization's highest-level emergency. The UN children's agency first sounded an alarm at the end of last year saying 400,000 children were at risk of dying in the central diamond-rich Kasai region, which has been devastated by fighting.
"The EU is extremely concerned about the worsening crisis in the DRC," the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid, Christos Stylianides, said at a press conference in the eastern city of Goma. "The humanitarian situation is getting worse day by day, and unfortunately I saw enormous suffering, enormous humanitarian needs and the situation in the country is not business as usual."
The crisis is further exacerbated by what appears to be the DRC's government's state of denial about the deepening crisis. Kinshasa is refusing to attend an international donor conference scheduled for April in Geneva that seeks to put together a $1.7 billion (1.4 billion euros) aid package.
Prime Minister Jose Makila dismissed such concerns, saying the UN had overreacted and that aid organizations in the country were propagating a "bad image of the Democratic Republic of Congo throughout the world." He said the international community's negativity would discourage investment at a time when the government was attempting to stabilize a volatile economy. "Activating the highest level of humanitarian emergency based on facts that are not real constitutes a hindrance to development," the government said in a statement. The government said it wouldn't cooperate with international aid organizations unless they adjusted their figures to coincide with its own.
http://www.dw.com/en/humanitarian-crisis-deepens-in-dr-congo-as-president-kabila-clings-to-power/a-43126071
"The EU is extremely concerned about the worsening crisis in the DRC," the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid, Christos Stylianides, said at a press conference in the eastern city of Goma. "The humanitarian situation is getting worse day by day, and unfortunately I saw enormous suffering, enormous humanitarian needs and the situation in the country is not business as usual."
The crisis is further exacerbated by what appears to be the DRC's government's state of denial about the deepening crisis. Kinshasa is refusing to attend an international donor conference scheduled for April in Geneva that seeks to put together a $1.7 billion (1.4 billion euros) aid package.
Prime Minister Jose Makila dismissed such concerns, saying the UN had overreacted and that aid organizations in the country were propagating a "bad image of the Democratic Republic of Congo throughout the world." He said the international community's negativity would discourage investment at a time when the government was attempting to stabilize a volatile economy. "Activating the highest level of humanitarian emergency based on facts that are not real constitutes a hindrance to development," the government said in a statement. The government said it wouldn't cooperate with international aid organizations unless they adjusted their figures to coincide with its own.
http://www.dw.com/en/humanitarian-crisis-deepens-in-dr-congo-as-president-kabila-clings-to-power/a-43126071
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