When did children become the target?

As many as 20 children die per day in refugee camps in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, due to disease and a lack of clean water. For anyone like me who is horrible at math, that's 7,300 children per year. These children are the ones killed simply from disease, not from actual violence or fighting from the conflict.

For years, Lendu militias have targeted rival Hema tribespeople with murderous raids and massacres. Needless to say, the Hema respond by killing Lendu civilians. Raids have become almost daily and have spread throughout the Ituri province.

About 75,000 people have fled the violence to squalid refugee camps, camps that are unable to provide for those who left everything behind. And while the U.N. has a presence at the camp, that is more to protect the starving inhabitants from future attacks than to ensure their survival, as such camps are often the target of tribal militias.

What's even more stunning is what is killing these children. Most of them are victims of either diarrhea or the measles, diseases that are far from life-threatening in Western civilizations. Children make up nearly 80 percent of the camp populations, and humanitarian workers simply cannot help them all, despite offering round-the-clock service. Most people in the camp eat only every two days.

Fighting in the Congo has left more than 50,000 dead in Ituri since 1999, and Jan Egeland, the U.N. humanitarian chief has named the Congo conflict as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. And the Ituri conflict is merely part of a war that killed nearly 4 million before its end in 2002.

For more information: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/03/26/congo.victims.ap/index.html