Heads of three UN aid agencies on Sunday started a joint tour of Africa's Great Lakes region, designed to highlight its refugee crisis.

According to a joint statement, the heads of UNICEF, the World Food Program (WFP) and the refugee agency UNHCR, on Sunday started their tour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

They are calling for greater assistance from the international community, said the statement.

The DRC's recent war cost 4 million lives and about 1.6 million people are still refugees.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, WFP Executive Director James Morris and UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Ann Veneman will go on to visit Rwanda and Burundi, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in civil wars in the early 1990s, it added.

"We hope their unprecedented mission to this neglected region will help re-focus international attention on the suffering of millions of refugees, internally displaced persons and returnees," the statement said.

"All three agencies are under-funded for their work in the Great Lakes region, which is just emerging from a tempest of conflicts that forced millions to flee in the 1990s," it said.

(Xinhua News Agency February 27, 2006)