Senior UN official pledges more humanitarian assistance for the north

The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, has pledged to "more than triple" humanitarian assistance to the troubled districts of northern Uganda, which he described as "one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises". Speaking to IRIN while on a two-day tour of the region from 8 - 9 November, Egeland promised he would do everything in his power to get northern Uganda onto the international agenda. "I am shocked by what I have seen in northern Uganda", Egeland said, shortly after visiting Kitgum town, near the Sudan border. "I am shocked by the sheer size of this crisis and the suffering of its victims. This is appalling". Egeland and his team of UN officials visited camps for some of Uganda’s 1.2 million internally displaced people (IDPs), and also saw some of the thousands of "night-time IDPs". These are people who trek into urban centres each night to sleep on the streets or in hospitals, bus parks and other places rather than risk staying in the rural areas and being targets for abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels. Egeland said the Ugandan crisis was one of the last "dark spots" for international attention in the world. "Liberia, eastern Congo, all have had significant investment in trying to relieve human suffering," he said. Egeland’s team met district officials and international organizations working in Kitgum to discuss the way forward. He later told IRIN that the local government representatives had asked for much more international attention, particularly on the humanitarian side, where they "rightly said it's going from bad to worse". "We told them we are massively increasing our presence in the north. My own department is set to expand from one office in Gulu to four offices in different locations in the north," Egeland said. But he added that none of the extra money would achieve anything unless "the government makes a real effort to improve security so that our aid workers can do their job". His comments came as between 40 and 60 people were reported massacred in a series of LRA attacks on civilian targets in Lira district, just south of Kitgum, allegedly in "retaliation" for the killing of one of their commanders by the Ugandan army. Local government sources said thousands of residents of Lira had fled their homes out of fear of further LRA attacks. The crisis in northern Uganda worsened considerably around July 2002, when the Ugandan government, following an agreement with the government of Sudan, launched Operation Iron Fist to destroy LRA bases in southern Sudan. The rebels were forced to abandon their bases and flooded back into Uganda. The UN estimates that some 1.2 million people have been displaced by LRA activity in the north - activity which includes attacking and looting villages, abducting scores of children to carry loot and forcibly recruit into their ranks, ambushing vehicles and destroying trading centres.