© IRIN
Molangue refugee camp, about 100 km south of Bangui, the CAR capital.
Les réfugiés du camp de MOLANGUE à 100km au sud de bangui
Les réfugiés luttent pour leur survie malgré la suspension de leurs rations alimentaires. C'est dans la précarité, la désolation et le dénuement qu'ils tentent d'organiser leur quotidien.
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Molangue refugee camp, about 100 km south of Bangui, the CAR capital. |
CAMP MOLANGUE, 17 July 2003 NU
(IRINnews) - In a clearing deep in the heart of a dense forest in the
Central African Republic, 2,960 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the
Congo eke out a living from small-scale enterprises following the suspension of
food aid in January.
The UN World Food Programme's suspension of food distributions to the 568 men,
542 women and 1,850 children at Camp Molongue about 100 km south of Bangui,
capital of the Central African Republic, has not dampened the spirits of the
refugees.
Mainly from the northern DRC province of Equateur, these refugees are fishermen,
farmers and small businessmen and women. They have seized on these skills and
formed at least 100 cooperatives to support their income-generating activities,
with help from the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), UN High
Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) and an Italian NGO, Cooperazione Internazionale
(COOPI).
The refugees began fleeing their country in May 1997 and initially lived in
northern CAR before being transferred to Molangue.
The FAO has been distributing cassava seeds to them since 2001, but they were
not given enough land to farm. In January, UNHCR provided half a hectare of land
to each refugee family and the FAO gave maize seeds to plant. However, the
Molangue camp agronomist, Faustin Mabele, said they needed at least two hectares
to be food self-sufficient.
A lack of adequate food has led to an increase in malnutrition among the
refugees. The chief nurse of the Molangue health centre, Jean-Blaise Yabingui,
said that 17 people were classified as malnourished each month beginning
December 2000 and 29 per month by June 2003.
While they wait for their eventual return home, survival remains the priority
for the refugees. Sylvain Makabi, a 39-year-old father of six, is the chairman
of a 20-member farming cooperative, the Association des Producteurs Refugies
Congolais en Centrafrique, or APRORECCA. He told IRIN on 12 July that the
cooperative expected to harvest 30 mt of maize in August from its 12 hectares of
land and needed a market.
"We call upon the FAO or WFP to come and buy our harvests," he said.
The previous year's harvest of 20 mt of crops was sold only within the camp and
at a very low price. COOPI is now trying to change this.
"We are trying to contact businessmen and convince them to go and buy refugees'
harvests," Massimiliano Pedretti, COOPI's representative in the CAR, told IRIN
on Monday.
He said that COOPI was waiting for money to build food storage barns in Bangui,
and that the officials of the NGO would be with the refugees while they
negotiated sale prices with prospective buyers.
Insecurity hinders fishing
Refugee fishermen have fared even worse than the maize farmers. Andre Bamotya,
61, is a father of nine and is a member of a 150-member association of fishermen.
COOPI gave nets to the fishermen who also built 120 dugout canoes and began
fishing in November 2002 in the Lobaye and Oubangui rivers.
Unfortunately, Bamotya said, the insecurity that followed Francois Bozize's
March 2003 coup forced fishermen to stop their work. Since then, Bamotya said
his family and those of his friends had neither sold nor eaten fish.
This was due in part to local resentment of the refugees, after a Congolese
rebel group at the time - Jean-Pierre's Bemba's Mouvement de liberation du Congo
(MLC) - entered the CAR to shore up Patasse's flagging government. The MLC
reportedly raped and pillaged their hosts, incurring the wrath of the locals.
However, the MLC fighters have returned to the Congo and relations between the
host community and the refugees have normalised. In addition, a government
official from the Commission National pour les Refugies, a body for refugee
affairs, has said it would soon begin processing identity cards for the refugees.
Presumably, with the hostility abated, the refugees will resume fishing.
Epidemic wipes out goats
For the refugees rearing goats, such as camp agronomist Faustin Mabele, there is
no such hope of immediate improvement in the business. Trying to diversify his
income base, he bought the animals for breeding but a few months afterwards an
unknown disease wiped out his herd, ending his venture into large-scale animal
husbandry.
But the bakers and soap makers have registered production success that,
ironically, has been an impediment to greater wealth. COOPI has provided 16
baker cooperatives 123 kg of wheat flour and 100 kg of sugar. The agency then
buys the bread from the cooperatives to feed 72 vulnerable people while
gradually deducting the cost of the commodities it had given on credit.
The COOPI coordinator at Molangue, Eduardo Pellamati, said that since January
his agency had bought two million loaves of bread, enabling the refugees to use
their earnings to buy their own flour and sugar. However, this apparent success
is tempered by another reality: overproduction.
"There are not enough buyers," Anne-Marie Awuya Ekanga, who heads an all-female
40-member baking association, said.
COOPI also provided credit of 100 litres of palm oil and caustic soda to
soap-making associations.
Again the main buyer is COOPI, which is paying 50 percent more for the soap than
the going market price in an environment where supply has outstripped demand.
Soap maker Zacharie Loumbala said that with 16 soap-making associations, the
market was crowded.
Loumbala's own association makes only about 3,000 francs CFA (US $5) each month
to share among its 20 members. He added that COOPI was also encouraging the
integration of local people into the refugee cooperatives, which has already
been done in most fishing and farming associations.
"We want to go beyond that refugee-COOPI circle by encouraging external buyers,"
Pedretti said.