JDC Dispatches Medical Team to Assist Refugees in Africa

An American Jewish organization has dispatched a medical team to Tanzania to help the huge influx of refugees from surrounding African nations resulting from ethnic strife in the region.

Rick Hodes, the doctor who heads the three-person Ethiopia-based team, has been in Tanzania since Saturday, said Gideon Taylor, assistant executive vice president for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

The team, which is working with the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.- based group, will initially be based in Kigoma, Tanzania, to provide medical aid to the Rwandan and Zairian refugees there.

The JDC sent its team to Tanzania because “at the moment, that is where there is a shortage of medical personnel,” Taylor said, adding that the team will be there for at least a month.

The JDC has had a presence in the region since the 1994 civil war in Rwanda, which saw the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people and which precipitated the current crisis in the region.

“I think many American Jews were struck by the scale and volume of the massacres” in Rwanda and thought that “in light of Jewish history” a response was important, Taylor said of those early events.

That commitment continues.

The crisis in central Africa, based largely on enmity between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, recently exploded with renewed fighting in eastern Zaire. The latest developments enabled hundreds of thousands of predominantly Rwandan refugees to flee camps in Zaire after more than two years.

The conflict in Zaire, a huge country with nine neighbors, threatens the stability of all of central Africa, U.S. observers have said.

The efforts by the JDC come as the international community, including the United Nations, is in the process of determining how to respond to the upheaval in central Africa.

The medical team’s presence in Tanzania is a continuation of the efforts of the 39 international Jewish groups that came together in 1994 “to facilitate a Jewish, humanitarian response” to the crisis in Rwanda. The JDC is the coalition’s operating arm.

Some of the 20,000 refugees already in Kigoma are “fleeing the fighting, many with gunshot wounds,” Taylor said.

The JDC, which is sending medical supplies as well, will also assist the tens of thousands of Burundian refugees streaming into neighboring Tanzania as a result of civil strife in their nation.

Unless something is done soon to relieve the tensions in Burundi, observers have said, it will collapse into chaos on a scale rivaling that of eastern Zaire and Rwanda.

Some 600,000 refugees, from several neighboring countries, are now in Tanzania.

Taylor said the JDC is planning to send a medical team to Rwanda as well, where hundreds of thousands of refugees are streaming back from Zaire.

Meanwhile, Israel has donated $30,000 in medical supplies to Zaire to assist people displaced by the fighting.