LONDON, July 24 (UPI) -- Violence, disease and malnutrition are killing as many as 1,200 people every day in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the U.N. Children's Fund says.
But the grim figure, part of a UNICEF report called Child Alert: DRC, issued Monday in London, was accompanied by a note of optimism.
The DRC's July 30 election, the country's first democratic election in 45 years, could prove a turning point for the war-ravaged country, the author of the report, UNICEF Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies for the United Kingdom Martin Bell, said.
The report compares the DRC's high rate of mortalities with statistics from other countries, and concludes the DRC is home to the world's deadliest humanitarian crisis. It notes, for instance, that more children under age five die each year there than in China, a country with 23 times its population. The country's overall mortality rate over a six month period is similar to the entire death toll resulting from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people in 12 countries.
Of the 1,200 people who die each day in the DRC, half are children.
"It is easy to be overwhelmed by what has happened in DRC because of the sheer scale of it. But we owe it to the children to give them the future they deserve and these elections may be the opportunity of their lifetime," Bell said.
Despite the magnitude of the crisis, UNICEF's representative for the DRC, Tony Bloomberg, says the agency's projected budget for this year is under-funded by 62 percent.
"While DRC has experienced death rates like that of the tsunami every six months, it has not received the attention it deserves, either from the media or the public," Bloomberg said.
