By Jiro Ose

GETY, Congo, Sept 9 (Reuters). The United Nations is running out of money to feed some of the 1.7 million displaced people in Democratic Republic of Congo and urgently needs aid, U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said on Saturday.

Visiting the Gety camp in eastern Congo, which is home to some 43,000 displaced people, Egeland said the central African country had witnessed the worst humanitarian disaster in the world over the past decade.

He compared it to the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda in which at least 800,000 people were killed in a few months.

"Congo is a disaster zone. Nowhere else in the world has lost 4 million people in the last eight years", Egeland said. "That is six Rwandan genocides. The world said never again but this is Rwanda again and again".

The tens of thousands of people in Gety were displaced by a joint offensive between the Congolese army and U.N. peacekeepers earlier this year to combat renegade militias which have not disarmed after a 1998-2003 involving six neighbouring countries.

Only a few weeks earlier, people had been dying of hunger at the camp, Egeland said.

The U.N. World Food Programme was able to get supplies to Gety in August, but resources remain extremely tight, he said.

"We do not have any more money to extend food pipeline for the rest of this year. We need $7 million dollars a month to keep going into 2007 here in Congo", said the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

July's historic elections, the first free polls in 40 years in Congo, have not ended the fighting nor stopped the humanitarian crisis in the former Belgian colony, he said.

The international community paid $460 million to help finance the polls in the hope they could help stabilise the region.

"It is too bad really that in this crucial year to make peace in the heart of Africa we do not even have enough funding for food", Egeland said.

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