Caritas meeting focuses on plight of Nigerians fleeing conflict zone

(Vatican Radio) Nigerians go to the polls on Saturday for a presidential election that was postponed by six weeks as the government battled to retake key north-eastern towns held by the militant group Boko Haram. Thousands of people have been killed and an estimated three million others have fled the region where the insurgents have been seeking to establish an Islamic state since 2009.

While many of those fleeing the violence are internally displaced, others have crossed the border into neighbouring  Niger, Chad and Cameroon.  Up to a million of these refugees are now reported to be in urgent need of basic food, shelter and medical supplies.

Representatives of Catholic aid agencies from across the central African nations took part in a two day meeting at the Caritas Internationalis headquarters here in Rome on Thursday and Friday to draw up a humanitarian action plan for the refugees and displaced families. The executive director of Caritas Nigeria, Fr Evaristus Bassey, says that Church agencies are struggling to do what they can in the face of the overwhelming needs: 

Listen to Philippa Hitchen's interview with Fr Evaristus Bassey: 

Fr Bassey says many of the refugees fled from their ancestral homes without even a change of clothes and walked for kilometres across the mountains to escape into Cameroon. He thanks the governments of neighbouring countries, as well as the United Nations, for efforts to support these displaced people but says the needs are still overwhelming....

Many of the camps, he notes, are little more than a piece of land where people try to survive in makeshift shelters with scarce food causing problems of malnutrition and disease. Corrpution is still a major problem in Nigeria, he says, with money being earmarked for these people, but rarely materialising, so Church agencies are trying to do what they can with their limited resources...

Fr Bassey also says that in the wake of the violence following the previous presidential elections, the security forces are better prepared ahead of this weekend's vote. The Church in Nigeria has been doing a lot, he says, to urge people to keep the peace and to put into practise the principles of their Christian faith...