June 21, 2000
The head of the United Nations refugee agency has warned that donors, weary of Africa's armed conflicts that generate refugees, are tiring of giving aid to the continent.
Sadako Ogata, ending a three-day visit to Uganda, said that Africa consumes 40 per cent of the one billion dollars annual budget of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
"There is a kind of primitive sense of helpness developing among donors in their attitude towards Africa. The number of conflicts in Africa surpass those of other regions in the world," Ogata told a reporters at a news briefing Wednesday.
"I got a lot of money to avert a crisis in Rwanda (in 1994). But when the crisis repeated itself, donors got a feeling of hopelessness. There is a feeling among donors that Africa is just producing refugees," Ogata said.
The UNHCR boss, who is retiring at the end of this year, is on a tour of the region and is flying to the Democratic Republic of Congo were a civil that has sucked in armies of six African states is simmering.
On Monday, she inspected refugee camps in northern Uganda harbouring about 170,000 refugees who fled from the civil war in Southern Sudan.
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