UN official urges equal attention to African crises

Some higher-profile emergencies in Africa have diverted donor attention from other disasters, straining relief agencies that are trying to maintain a focus on the less visible situations, a United Nations official said on Wednesday. "The world is focusing on new emergencies like Darfur. The crises in Uganda, Somalia, the DR Congo and southern Sudan itself have almost been forgotten," Dennis McNamara, special adviser of the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator on Internal Displacement and director of the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division, said when he visited camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Uganda. "The consolidated appeal for the humanitarian situation in Uganda this year was US $120 million, but only half of that was realised. Relief work in southern Sudan required 200 million dollars, but the appeal has since realised only $17 million," he said. He added that although there were over a million IDPs in Darfur, the attention of the world had shifted from the 1.6 million in Uganda and from the DR Congo where the number of IDPs was also very high. Dan Odwedo, administrative officer of Lira District in northern Uganda, told McNamara’s delegation that IDPs had been moving from urban to rural camps and, as a result the camps were becoming less congested. However, few IDPs were going back home for fear of being attacked by LRA rebels, even though no LRA attacks had been recorded in the district in the past three months, Odwedo added. He said that because life in the IDP camps was hard, there had been increased reports of prostitution among young girls, but the district did not have a specialised agency to address the problem. At an earlier meeting with religious leaders in Gulu town, 360 km north of the capital, Kampala, McNamara was told that the current lull in violence in war-torn northern Uganda was not necessarily a sign that the conflict between the LRA and the Ugandan government had come to an end. "We are still on a slippery ground. We are not very sure that the many people (rebels) coming out of the bush are marking the end of the war because every day we hear about what the LRA does in Sudan," Archbishop John Baptist Odama, leader of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, said. Last week, the LRA attacked and captured a village in southern Sudan's Equatoria Region. A Sudanese militia group, the Equatoria Defence Force (EDF), said that hundreds of rebels were involved in the attack on Katire village, which its militiamen had been guarding. EDF commander Martin Kenyi said that between 25 and 27 June, the LRA had killed hundreds of civilians in Equatoria. Brig Mohammed Habib of the Sudanese army said the LRA had terrorised the people in southern Sudan just as much as in northern Uganda. McNamara called for the development of a contingency plan that would address the challenges of resettling the IDPs who fled LRA attacks on their homes. The LRA, which is said to have bases in southern Sudan, has fought the Uganda government since 1988. About 1.6 million people have been displaced by the conflict and live. The insurgents have perpetrated gross atrocities against civilians, abducting children for conscription into their ranks and forcing girls to become "wives" of rebel commanders. Some 12,000 children have been abducted since June 2002. The UN Children's Fund warned on Tuesday that the continued kidnapping of children by the LRA remains a "cause for great distress". It urged Ugandan civilian and military authorities to protect the rights of formerly abducted children, adding that this could be done by allowing them direct passage to NGO centres where they could receive urgent medical care and begin the process of reunification with families.