UN Seeks $130m to End 'War
Against Children' in N. Uganda
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
THE UNITED Nations and some European Union member states are about to make a concerted push for peace in Uganda.
The international effort to end the 17-year-long conflict in northern Uganda is expected to be launched on either November 18 or 19 with a UN appeal for some $130 million in humanitarian aid for those displaced by the fighting.
Relief initiatives will spearhead the UN-led effort to focus the world�s attention on a war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and forced more than one million Ugandans from their homes. UN officials say that their enlarged commitment to helping victims of the war will be accompanied by attempts to promote peace through diplomatic rather than military means.
A new determination to stop the violence in northern Uganda was signalled last week by a high-ranking UN official who visited the region. The conflict there is "the biggest forgotten, neglected humanitarian emergency in the world today," said Jan Egeland, the UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs.
"We, the United Nations, have also done too little. The donors have done too little. The government has done too little. We have all done too little," Mr Egeland said. "We must rectify that."
Donor countries are ready to join the peace offensive, Mr Egeland added in comments to a UN news service. "I am sure that major capitals in North America, Europe and Africa will send a very clear message to the parties that this situation cannot continue as it is," he said.
Mr Egeland also spoke passionately about the suffering inflicted on children in the war zone.
"How can we as an international community accept that a war is continuing that is directed and targeted against children... who are abducted, brainwashed and made into child soldiers or sex slaves and forced to attack and kill their own families in their own villages?" he asked. "This senseless slaughter must end. It cannot and should not continue one day more."
Mr Egeland�s remarks at a Nairobi news conference coincided with the release in New York of a UN report charging that child soldiers were being used by the Ugandan military as well as by the insurgent Lord�s Resistance Army.
UN monitors reported that Joseph Kony�s LRA had abducted more than 8,000 children in the past year � the largest number of abductions since the outbreak of fighting in 1986. The study added, "The Uganda People�s Defence Forces (UPDF) and its allied Local Defence Units (LDUs) recruit and use children. UPDF has also re-recruited children who have escaped or been rescued from LRA."
A screening operation jointly conducted by Unicef and Mr Egeland�s office found that 120 recruits in the UPDF�s Lugore training camp were under the age of 18. Some of these children had been demobilised, the report added.
Ugandan military officials and government leaders have repeatedly denied that the UPDF recruits child soldiers.
But Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni does not appear interested in seeking a political settlement to the conflict.
In an interview during his recent visit to the US, Museveni told the allafrica.com news service that he expects Ugandan forces will soon win a military victory over the LRA, whom he referred to as "bandits." Insisting that "the bandits are being dismantled," Museveni said, "We have killed many of their leaders. Just a few days before I came here we killed the number-three in their group. That leaves us with only two people to kill and the whole thing will be over."
In a report to the press last week, President Museveni said, "We are working harder to strengthen the Amuka groups in Lang'o. The Kony gangs have two options: either to do what I told them to do in my Gulu speech in August last year, or to perish like their colleagues, including Tabuley, in recent times.
The war appears to be worsening, however, not winding down. In addition to the increase in child abductions, the estimated number of displaced persons in northern Uganda has risen in the past year from 800,000 to 1.2 million.
While the Dutch and some other members of the European Union seem determined to press for peace in Uganda, it is not clear that the US will join the effort. Washington has recently begun supplying the UPDF with limited assistance in its war against Kony�s group, and the Bush team gives no indication that it is prodding Museveni to make a deal with the LRA.
At the same time, US policy in Africa generally aims to encourage stability. Washington continues to work for peace in Sudan, for example � and resolution of that country�s civil war could lead to a tapering off of violence in northern Uganda.
The UN meanwhile hopes that the momentum toward peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as in Sudan will facilitate a settlement in Uganda.
But there is little reason to suppose that the LRA will enter negotiations for an end to the fighting. Officials in Washington as well as at UN headquarters point to the Kony group�s lack of a political component as a possibly insurmountable obstacle to a peace settlement.
Under one optimistic scenario, the UN humanitarian and diplomatic initiatives will progress to the point where a breakthrough could occur at the international conference on peace and development in the Great Lakes Region, scheduled to take place in Nairobi next June.
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