Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The United Nations should be officially invited to lend a hand in dealing with Cape Town's refugee crisis, city mayor Helen Zille said on Monday.

She was reacting to remarks by a UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) official visiting the city that the body was willing to help but had not been asked to do so.

The official, Arvind Gupta, also reportedly said the UNHCR did not agree with the city's establishment of special camps to house the refugees.

The six camps currently hold some 6600 people; another 12,000 are scattered at other venues throughout the city.

Zille said in a statement that the city welcomed Gupta's critique, but was more in need of practical assistance in the form of the resources and expertise of his organisation.

The UNHCR had a large department specifically resourced to deal with crises of international magnitude such as this.

"The city does not have such resources. We call on the national government to invite the UN to help us address the issue," she said.

She said the city fully agreed that people should be reintegrated into their communities if this was what they wanted, and it had called for an SANDF peace-keeping force to facilitate this.

However it could not force displaced people to return to their communities, any more than it could force them to come to the safety sites.

She said hundreds of people were demanding entry to the sites, which include several city-owned beach resorts, every day, and many of the sites were now full to capacity.

"We would gratefully accept any venues that can be made available by the province and additional venues by the department of defence.

"We cannot process people's needs in scores of tiny locations across the city," she said.

The city strongly urged the UNHCR and embassies to become involved in addressing the plight of the thousands of people who wanted to return to their countries of origin.