DAVOS: Colombia’s finance minister called on Wednesday for an emergency plan to help neigbouring Venezuela after what he said will be its imminent collapse.
“The collapse of the (Venezuelan) economy is close,” minister Mauricio Cardenas told AFP on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“The idea is to have ready an economic plan for Venezuela for the day after,” he added.
“We do not know when that day will come but it will happen quickly due to the seriousness of the crisis.”
He called for a plan involving the Internatonal Monetary Fund or regional lenders to help provide medicine and other essential supplies.
Venezuela is in a desperate economic and political crisis that has caused hunger and deadly violence.
The Colombian government says more than half a million Venezuelans have fled onto its territory.
Venezuela’s governing Constituent Assembly, loyal to Socialist President Nicolas Maduro, said Tuesday the country will hold a presidential election by the end of April.
Maduro hopes to triumph over a divided opposition and win a second term. The opposition says he has turned into a dictator.
Colombia calls for emergency plan for Venezuela
Colombia calls for emergency plan for Venezuela
UN arrives in east DR Congo town to prepare ceasefire mission
- Eastern DRC has been ravaged by three decades of conflict and faces renewed violence
KINSHASA: A team of UN peacekeepers arrived in the flashpoint eastern Democratic Republic of Congo town of Uvira to prepare the deployment of a ceasefire?monitoring mission, the force said Tuesday.
Eastern DRC has been ravaged by three decades of conflict and faces renewed violence following the 2021 resurgence of the M23 armed group, backed by Rwanda and its army.
The M23 seized large swathes of territory in the east and launched an offensive in December on Uvira, a strategic town in South Kivu province near the border with Burundi.
The assault drew condemnation from the United States, which has mediated a fragile peace deal between the DRC and Rwanda.
That agreement provided for the UN’s DRC peacekeeping mission MONUSCO to carry out a field-monitoring operation with a view to implementing a permanent ceasefire.
On Tuesday, MONUSCO and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, a grouping of surrounding countries, said in a statement they had deployed a joint exploratory and preliminary assessment mission to Uvira.
Scheduled to run until Friday, the mission focuses on assessing access, security, logistics and engagement needs, MONUSCO said.
The statement called the mission “an essential step toward deploying the future joint ceasefire?monitoring mechanism.”
In January, the M23 withdrew its last troops from Uvira, claiming it was responding to a US request. The Congolese army said it had retaken control of the town.
