Facing Escalating Crisis in Uganda, UN Food Agency Appeals for Urgent Funding
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UN News Service (New York)
May 13, 2004
Posted to the web May 13, 2004
With daily rebel attacks spreading fear among hundreds of thousands of innocent
civilians in northern Uganda, the United Nations emergency feeding agency today
appealed for urgent donations to meet the growing food needs of at least 1.6 million
displaced people in the area, where the crisis threatens to worsen dramatically.
"The people of northern Uganda are suffering on a massive, shameful scale," said World
Food Programme (WFP) Uganda Country Director Ken Davies. "They are urgently in need of
help, and we risk failing them unless we receive new donations very soon."
An 18-year rebellion against the government by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is
behind the immense population displacement. Rebels continue to attack camps for
displaced people, burn homes, loot assets, abduct children, rape and kill, in a brutal
campaign of violence, according to WFP. They have also disrupted road travel by
ambushing vehicles.
The number of people in need, 80 per cent of them women and children, has doubled in
the past year and the sheer scale of the crisis is stretching the agency's resources
in Uganda to the breaking point. Some $56 million is required before the end of the
year. But unless significant donations are received in the coming weeks, stocks of
cereals will be exhausted by July. WFP needs $21 million now to continue to supply
food until August, when the harvest is due.
Without new funding, WFP will be forced to cut rations drastically. This month, it had
to cut fortified blended food for young children from the standard household ration,
conserving dwindling supplies for therapeutic feeding centres and primary schools. To
make matters worse, displaced farmers missed the April planting season. As a result,
even if the rebel attacks cease, many Ugandan civilians will need assistance until the
end of the year to survive.
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Frequent attacks are preventing people leaving camps to tend fields and gather
firewood, making an already precarious existence even more difficult, the agency said.
In the past week, LRA rebels are reported to have attacked three women and a child who
were returning home from selling goods at a market, forcing them to strip before
killing them and then mutilating their bodies. The rebels also killed more than 50
others in the same period, either during raids on their villages or on market days.
Ugandan army efforts to protect its civilians have proved only partially successful.
"Vicious raids by marauding rebels create a climate of terror that prevents farmers
from reaching their fields to plant crops," Mr. Davies said. "We are dealing with a
critical, ongoing crisis."
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This service is hosted on the Infocom network
http://www.infocom.co.ug
