United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) leaders have called for urgent humanitarian intervention in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province.
Nearly 700,000 people from Cabo Delgado have been displaced due to attacks by armed groups.
Approximately 100,000 internally displaced people have sought refuge in and around Pemba in temporary shelter sites, such as school buildings, or with host families, increasing the city’s population by a third.
It is understood that many displaced persons cannot access clean drinking water and are exposed to malaria with barely any protection.
UNHCR Assistant High Commissioners, Gillian Triggs and Raouf Mazou, recently visited the area.
They said they heard shocking stories from survivors of a crisis that is unfolding in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and the aftermath of several devastating cyclones.
‘If one looks at the speed at which we are seeing the number of internally displaced persons rise, we know that the window of opportunity that we have is closing’, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Operations, Mazou, told journalists in Geneva.
The insurgency that started in October 2017 has continued to increase in intensity as it has forced almost a fifth of the province’s people to leave their homes.
According to UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Triggs, more than 2,000 people have been killed, but it is not clear who the insurgents are, how they are supported, or what they want.
The displaced people, more than half of them children, fled by boat or on land for safer areas further south in Cabo Delgado province.
Most, or around 90 percent, have found shelter with family and friends in urban areas, or with host communities in villages.
It is understood that the Mozambican government is developing sites for the remaining displaced people.
The government, according to the UN agency, has also moved some people from overcrowded areas to a settlement site, where they are living in primitive conditions, and shelter, food, clothing, as well as water and sanitation, are desperately needed.
Triggs said while the authorities distributed food there in December, no further distributions have occurred since, either by the government or the World Food Programme (WFP).
Triggs also said she heard shocking stories of grandmothers caring for orphaned grandchildren, which is now becoming commonplace.
‘In this case, the grandmother was caring for a baby, a few months old. Her daughter had been killed in the conflict’, she said.
‘The father of the child had been killed, beheaded, And the grandmother was now in this period of grief, trying to care for this child without milk, where they were grinding up root vegetables for the children, giving them diarrhoea and exposing them to all sorts of other things’.
In a recent report, Save the Children International (SCI) raised concerns over the ‘beheading of children’ in the Mozambique province of Cabo Delgado.
The humanitarian organisation said children as young as 11 were reportedly being killed in the province.
With the Mozambican government saying it is uncertain that people will be able to return home, given the instability, Mazou pointed to the need for greater international support.
Source: UN News
Photo source: UNHCR/Martim Gray Pereira
