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The East African (Nairobi)
November 17, 2003
Posted to the web November 18, 2003
Bamuturaki Musinguzi
Nairobi
Dickson Otto's dream is to move out of the Pagak Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp where he has lived for eight years. He wants to return home to lead a normal life like his fellow Ugandans in the rest of the country.
"If it is possible, we should be allowed to return home, because we have stayed for too long in this camp," he says in his appeal to whoever cares to listen.
Otto's dream is not different from that of majority of the approximately 13,000 IDPs in Pagak camp, located in Lamogi sub county, Kilak County, 24 km northwest of Gulu town.
Otto, a native of Gulu, has lived in the camp since it was established in 1996. He and his fellow villagers, who were successful farmers, now depend on food aid. He remembers the fertile fields he used to cultivate back home, where the yields gave them enough food for their families and a host of other social and economic benefits.
"We have none of the things associated with a proper family setting like privacy, liberty and a sense of ownership. Here, we even lack basic necessities like food," he told The EastAfrican in Pagak recently.
The Catholic Archbishop of Gulu, John Baptist Odama, says: "Our concerns have not changed, but the situation has got to change.
"People have even married in the camps and their children will curse us for having failed to change their lives. Yet the situation is worsening instead of improving."
Odama, who is the chairman of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, attributes the failure to end this conflict to "lack of trust among the warring parties."
Pagak is one of the original camps where displaced people were settled in 1996. It also hosts IDPs from the smaller camps of Kaladima and Guruguru, which were established by the government in 2000 and were relocated from their original locations to Pagak in 2002 because of the deteriorating security in their areas.
The camp has a population of 5,161 males and 5,882 females, making 2,743 households. Kaladima has 817 male and 887 female inmates, with 430 households. Guruguru has 2,511 male and 2,548 female IDPs making 993 households.
There are four primary schools in the camp and three of them belong to IDPs relocated from Kaladima and Guruguru.
Due to lack of a health unit in the camp, patients have to travel to Awere health unit, about 5km away, for treatment.
The accommodation facilities in the camps have been described by the civil society organisations operating in the Acholi sub-region as "makeshift shelters dotted all over the northern and eastern parts of the country."
The IDP "protected camps," with the assistance of non-governmental organisations, offer some relief food to the displaced people but basic social services remain inadequate leading to poor education and health conditions. Lack of safe water and sanitation facilities worsens the situation.
The "protected" life in the camps has also led to a total breakdown of the traditional Acholi, economic, social and cultural structures.
According to the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), the only humanitarian agency reaching all the camps in the two regions, life in the IDP camps is appalling.
An average camp is approximately one square mile in area with an estimated population of 15,000 people living in crammed small huts with inadequate space and limited facilities like water, latrines, schools and health facilities.
"The prolonged displacement in this type of living environment has exposed many IDPs to increasing levels of vulnerability," the WFP notes in a statement.
The plight of the people was highlighted in the WFP Emergency Food Needs Assessment (EFNA) 2001 report.
The displacement has hindered the majority of IDPs from producing enough food for their families, hence greatly affecting the food security situation in the district and making them dependent on food aid, which is not sustainable in the long run.
Since these camps receive reliable rainfall, the people are engaged in small-scale agriculture growing rice, cassava, simsim, finger millet, groundnuts and sweet potatoes.
The head of the Gulu WFP sub-office, Pedro Amolat, told The EastAfrican: "People top up their livelihood through petty trade in charcoal, fire wood, vegetables and casual labour. The camp market is usually deserted with few items on sale."
NGOs and other donors have been scaling down their operations in the district since June 2002, following deterioration of security. Those remaining operate mainly within Gulu municipality.
According to the latest population census, Gulu has 472,496 inhabitants, 236,434 of them male and 243,062 female. The insurgency has resulted in the displacement of approximately 416,254 people of the district population into 33 IDP camps since 1996.
Since June 2002, approximately 29,000 tonnes of food have been distributed to the affected population.
WFP provides food assistance to over 1.2 million IDPs in northern and eastern Uganda using armed military escorts. In the eastern region, there are 305,899 displaced persons from Kumi, Soroti, Katakwi and Kaberamaido. There are 928,215 from the districts of Gulu, Kitgum, Pader and Lira in northern Uganda.
When the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) stepped up attacks on the camps in June last year, WFP responded by increasing its rations from meeting 30 per cent of the daily minimum nutritional requirements to 100 per cent.
In January this year, WFP assisted the Ministry of Health and the Gulu District Department for Health Services to carry out a rapid nutritional assessment in two IDP camps in Gulu, at Anaka and Pabbo. The results showed a "serious situation" in terms of global acute malnutrition, with 31 per cent for Anaka and 18 per cent for Pabbo.
WFP also started the school feeding programme (SFP), which is meant to increase attendance in schools especially of disadvantaged pupils and enhance the learning capacity of the children in the programme.
SFP is supported under the USAid-led Global School Feeding Initiative (GSFI) providing one cooked meal (lunch) per day to 79,000 primary school children in Gulu and Kitgum currently.
Before the emergency, approximately 70,000 school children in 145 primary schools were receiving WFP assistance through SFP, with participating schools being mostly from the camps or close proximity to the camps.
The insurgency disrupted the SFP as most schools were closed and risk of looting and abductions at school escalated. WFP is now focusing on the displaced camps in the municipality and their host schools.
"The rationale is that children from the displaced schools in the municipality have come to town due to the insecurity and are hence uprooted from their former setting", Amolat said. "Since they or their parents are not assisted by WFP through GFD, the SFP intervention is strategically encouraging the children to continue their education while displaced in town."
SFP has since July resumed operations in the camps after an assessed reduced risk in continuing with the programme. It is expected to benefit 120,000 primary school pupils in 172 primary schools and an estimated 10,000 pre-school children.
The head teacher of Pagak Primary School, John Fred Okema, has his own reservations about food distribution in camps. He says the programme interferes with his classes on the days when there is food distribution every month. "No one cares for classes during the programme. Every pupil's mind is on the food programme, so they abandon classes," he says.
Food needs of the displaced persons have continued to rise in the face of intensified insurgency by the LRA since June 2002. "Although the programming process is flexible to accommodate both relief and recovery needs, the current unpredictable LRA insurgency remains a challenge to the programme," cautions WFP.
"Donor response has been good. Food and cash pledges and confirmation have been received," said Amolat. "WFP will therefore be able to meet its food requirement to feed the desperately hungry and poor people in the camps through to December this year."
WFP now encourages NGO communities to provide non-food items to complement food resources to IDPs.
The northern conflict started in 1986 when former soldiers of the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) regrouped themselves and started a guerilla movement called the Uganda People's Democratic Army (UPDA) against the NRM/A government for alleged excesses committed when they captured northern Uganda.
Several rebel groups emerged during the same period and following the 1988 peace accord between a UPDA faction and the government, the LRA eventually became the main armed opposition group in the region.
An NGO called Gulu Civil Society says the government has used the military option with intervals of concurrent peace initiatives as a strategy to address the conflict without any predictable end in sight. It has appealed to the international community to take a more active and positive direct role, and "work towards expeditious resolution of the conflict through meaningful dialogue.
"Human rights violations are common as a result of the nearly two decades of the internecine conflict," says the civil society.
Access to camps remains a major concern for aid agencies. Regular attacks, ambushes, abductions and killings by LRA rebels have resulted in increased insecurity.
WFP has included Teso region among the world's hunger spots. It says places with severe food shortage in the region are increasing requiring particular attention.
The army has been unable to provide adequate protection to civilian and humanitarian organisations. Humanitarian agencies have been unable to access the majority of the IDP camps because of the rampant insecurity across the sub-region.
Gulu Civil Society believes that a solution based on military intervention is inappropriate. "This is evidenced by the numerous failed attempts by the government to end the conflict through military means. Instead, these efforts have been counter-productive as they have led to increased suffering of civilians at the hands of rebels."
The NGO argues that whereas the international community is doing a good job in funding relief operations in the north, additional efforts to bring an end to the conflict through peaceful means are required. They want the donor community to act as mediators.
Unicef estimates that 18,000 adults and about 10,000 children were abducted between 1990 and 2001. Since the child-rescue military intervention "Operation Iron Fist" in 2002, around 8,000 children and the same number of adults have been abducted by the LRA.
Most of the adults were released but more than half of the children have not been accounted for to date and are believed to either have died or still be in captivity.
