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Yearning for LOVE AND CARE: Egeland meets
children in a displaced people�s camp in Kitgum on
Saturday |
By Tim Cocks
in kitgum
TWENTY-FOUR hours in Kitgum was
all it took. As he stepped back onto his chartered plane at Kitgum
airstrip, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian
Affairs, Jan Egeland, concluded that �northern Uganda must be one of the
worst humanitarian crises in the world.�
�I am deeply shocked by
what I have seen.
�I am shocked by the sheer size of this crisis
and the suffering of its victims. This is appaling,� Egeland said.
He said in the light of what he had seen, he would report back to
the UN offices in New York and Geneva with a message that �this conflict
must have more international attention.�
�This is above all a war
against children. They are abducted, abused and violated. A total of 8,500
children abducted just this year! That is a catastrophe,� he said.
Egeland and his team of UN delegates from New York visited camps
for the internally displaced people (IDPs) in Kitgum district. They also
saw some of the thousands of �night-time� IDPs � those who live at home
during the day and trek into Kitgum town centre each night to sleep out on
the streets rather than stay at home and risk being a target for
abduction.
They then met district officials and international
organisations working in the district.
Egeland pledged to �more than
triple� humanitarian assistance to the troubled region.
�We told
them we are massively increasing our presence in the north. My own UN
department is set to expand from one office in Gulu to four offices in
different locations in the north,� he said.
Egeland said the
Ugandan crisis is 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. I feel personally bad
that I was in Madrid when US$33b was raised for Iraq in a single day. Yet
this crisis is in many ways worse than Iraq,� he said.
But he
added that Uganda needed to do more to guarantee the security of aid
workers.
�Poor security is still the single biggest constraint on aid.
Unless the government of Uganda can guarantee safe passage for
humanitarian workers, none of this extra money for helping the people of
the north is going to achieve anything,� Egeland said.
Kitgum
Resident District Commissioner Lt. Okot Lapolo admitted that not enough
had been done to improve security.
�We will definitely try to
improve security. We recognise this has been a failing of ours,� he said.
Ends
Published on: Monday, 10th November,
2003 |
