UN highlights Great Lakes crisis

Thousands of Congolese refugees depend on UN food aid

The heads of the three main UN aid agencies have begun a joint tour of Africa's Great Lakes region designed to highlight its refugee crisis.

The heads of Unicef, the World Food Programme and the refugee agency UNHCR, started their tour in Democratic Republic of Congo.

They are calling for greater assistance from the international community.

DR Congo's recent war cost four million lives and about 1.6 million people are still refugees, the UN says.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, World Food Programme Executive Director James Morris and UN Children's Fund (Unicef) Executive Director Ann Veneman will go on to visit Rwanda and Burundi, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in civil wars in the early 1990s.

"We hope their unprecedented mission to this neglected region will help re-focus international attention on the suffering of millions of refugees, internally displaced persons and returnees," UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond said.

"All three agencies are under-funded for their work in the Great Lakes region, which is just emerging from a tempest of conflicts that forced millions to flee in the 1990s," they said in a joint statement.