Rebels threaten progress in the east, local organisations say

The spread of the Lord's Resistance Army's insurgency since June to eastern Uganda’s Teso region is threatening to reverse "progress" made in there over the last ten years, say local organisations. "For the last 10 years east and central Uganda has finally got peace and development," said Mark Palin, head of Agape Education Trust, a local organisation working to improve the quality of secondary education in Teso. He said his group had been running a school in Kaberameido district, north of Soroti, for about 200 children. "The school is now closed and all of our teachers are hiding. The kids have got to senior 4 [final year], so we want keep things going, but it’s tough." Up to 1993, the Teso region was rocked by the Uganda People’s Army, a local rebel group which rose up in 1987 against the newly installed government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Since then the region has been recovering slowly, owing to a number of development initiatives. "Definitely rural development projects have suffered major disruption," said Jonathon Nama, operations manager of the Teso Rural Development Trust, a regional microfinance institute providing credit to businesses and farmers. "Most of our clients are in the rural areas, doing farming, petty trade, hotels, etc. With these small businesses you have to monitor performance, but we no longer have contact with the areas we lend in." Nama said the institute had no way of even knowing how much it had lost. "I’d stop short of saying we’ve lost all our money yet," he said, "but we have certainly had a shock." He added that in the short term it would be a "real struggle" to help Teso recover economically. "A lot of the development work we helped set up has now been destroyed. Businesses have been ruined, shops have been burnt and looted. Crops are not being maintained," he told IRIN. Alan Chadbourn, a senior officer of Youth with a Mission, a Christian development group involved in improving agricultural efficiency, said the loss of contact between his group and the rural areas in which they were supposed to be operating was "a disaster". "The whole reason we came to Uganda was to help Teso rebuild itself after being brought to its knees by insurgency," he told IRIN. "This new insurgency has ruined much of our work. We now can’t get near the areas where we distribute tools to keep an eye on their use, or help in training." The LRA normally operates in the Acholi region of northern Uganda. However, it extended its operations to nearby Teso in June.