UN official urges enhanced attention to crisis in north

A senior UN official has urged the international community to pay more attention to the humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda, where a long-standing conflict has displaced 1.6 people, and 20,000 children have been kidnapped by rebels. "Where else in the world have there been 20,000 kidnapped children?," Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and the UN's Emergency Relief Coordinator, told reporters in New York on Thursday. Egeland was there to brief the Security Council on several humanitarian issues in Africa. "Where else in the world have 90 percent of the population in large districts been displaced? Where else in the world do children make up 80 percent of the terrorist insurgency movement?," he asked. "For me, the situation [in northern Uganda] is a moral outrage," the UN News Service quoted Egeland as saying. Egeland said he was heartened that the Security Council had devoted time to the situation in northern Uganda and that there was a unanimous view that the situation merited more international attention and increased efforts to bring an end to the senseless killing and suffering. Uganda's Information Minister James Nsaba Buturo also said the country needed "a lot of help" to improve the lives of those displaced by the conflict, but he emphasized that the situation in the north was getting better. "It is true our people need a lot of help. The challenge we face is that people need to live their normal lives again," he told IRIN in Kampala on Friday. "What is needed now is investing in improving people's lives. Investing in improved infrastructure, like roads, schools and hospitals." Egeland acknowledged that there had been positive signals from the government of Uganda, citing more security in a number of areas, a larger presence by government forces to help protect humanitarian work, a new law concerning those uprooted from their homes and more recognition "of how big the problem is". "We hope, on the humanitarian side, that we're now seeing a beginning of an end to this 18-year, endless litany of horrors, where the children are the fighters and the victims in northern Uganda," said Egeland. "This would take a much bigger international investment - in money, in political engagement, in diplomacy and also, a more concerted effort to tell the parties there is no military solution," he said. "There is a solution through reconciliation, an end to the killing and the re-integration and demobilization of the child combatants," he added. The LRA is infamous for its atrocities against civilians and abductions of thousands of children, who are forced to serve as soldiers or as sex slaves, and has been widely condemned by human rights groups and UN aid agencies. The rebel group, led by a former catechist, Joseph Kony, initially said it was fighting to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni and replace it with an administration based on the Biblical Ten Commandments. But it has not been possible to get a clear understanding of what the group's aims really are, mainly because, unlike most of the world's rebel groups, the LRA has no relations with the outside world.