Up to 800,000 people in the Republic of the Congo – a quarter of the population – were internally displaced during the 1990s by armed conflict in the Pool region between government forces and rebels originating from among the Lari ethnic group. The conflict ended in 2003, and by 2006, according to a government estimate, only 7,800 people remained displaced in Pool. Since then no new assessment of the number of IDPs has been conducted, and the UN reported no change to the government estimate in its Displaced Populations Report of January – March 2009. More significantly, no study of whether former IDPs have achieved durable solutions has been carried out, leaving unanswered the question of whether internal displacement has really ended in the Republic.

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