Once again yu may want to read the article below , baring in mind , the article posted by Mr. Oracle ( to which I have been reffering to)..
MK
Uniquely Savage War
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The East African (Nairobi)
March 21, 2005
Posted to the web March 23, 2005
David Kaiza
Nairobi
David Kaiza goes to northern Uganda where the government has herded 1.6 million people into IDP camps where starvation and sickness rule
AT THE PAJULE THERAPEUTIC Feeding Centre in northern Uganda, 43-year-old Sylvia Alwoc sits nursing her one-year-old granddaughter and orphan, Winnie Akano. Winnie is emaciated - her upper arms no larger than her grandmother's thumb, her skin as wrinkled as that of a person twice her grandmother's age.
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Like Winnie, the children here have multiple of nutritional afflictions - kwashiakor, anaemia, marasmus and oedema - and easily become victims of malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, diarrhoea, measles and respiratory illness. Medics say that at least 80 per cent lack iron.
As I talk to 22-year-old Pasca Atimayo, at the Pajule Catholic Mission, who has just received her rations of maize and beans from the World Food Programme (WFP), she pauses in mid-sentence. But it is not to recollect something. She is out of breath, not strong enough to support so much talking.
The food she has been given is meant to last a month. But she says it will run out before the week ends. She looks after five orphaned children and has two of her own. Her grandparents share her hut as well.
David Kidega, 35, has six children. He says the food given to him by the WFP does not last more than a week. He has to supplement that by earning around Ush500 (28 US cents) on the days there is an odd job to do.
Atimayo and Kidega can't afford medical treatment. They say that someone told them that when children have a fever, you dig out a pawpaw root, boil it and drink the stuff; similarly, you boil eucalyptus leaves for a cough.
The group gathered around Kidega is racked by coughing and wheezing among the children. The adults have bloodshot eyes and bony chests that stick out of their tattered clothes.
THIS HAS BEEN THE LIFE of the people of northern Uganda since 2003, when the government uprooted local residents from their homes and bundled them into camps following the failure of the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) to defeat the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in an operation dubbed "Iron Fist."
The government's action - meant to deny the LRA food and refuge among the people - effectively stopped agricultural activities in Gulu, Pader, Kitgum, Lira, Soroti and Apac district, rendering the residents destitute.
The WFP is overstretched trying to feed 1.6 million camp interns.
Agriculture not only provided nourishment, but was, for most, the only source of family income. Now, food is so scarce it has become a currency; a weapon in the war; and an inducement for children to go to school. Even work is paid for in pulses and cereals.
"Food is absolutely everything," says Ken Davies, the WFP country director in Uganda. "It is a desperate situation. What we are doing there is saving lives."
In the camps, malnutrition quickly graduates into disease as children lose the strength to fight off infectious diseases.
WFP alone stands between them and mass starvation. The food is delivered in convoys that stretch more than a kilometre.
From Lira to Pajule, the convoy grinds along the dusty Kitgum road in a grim drive through a region that has been pushed to the point of desperation and beyond, past rusted remains of vehicles burnt at ambushes.
For hours it meets only a handful of people - solitary figures crossing the road ahead are suspicious and don't linger.
When we enter Pajule, it is immediately clear why the convoys are needed. The children lining up the roadside are clad in dirty, threadbare clothing. Their stomachs are distended, the hair turning a wispy gold, the pasty eyes a magnet for flies.
Inside the camp, the realities are jolting: The digging of graves goes on all the time. Those still alive, live amid the smell of human waste and uncollected garbage. Immediately, you notice that this is a glass prison, for beyond the huts, the world is a cleaner, greener place that you are not allowed to go to.
Alice Acam, co-ordinator of the Christian Counselling Centre, talks with urgency. She needs more food, more money and transportation and communication and expertise than she will get. Her work is to rehabilitate the children who have escaped from the fighting. But it appears futile. "Hunger is killing the children," she says.
She says that 10 to 14 year-olds ought to eat at least 20 kg of meat, poultry and fish a year, no less than 10 kg of vegetable and fruit with a daily intake of 400 grammes of carbohydrates.
Brenda Kaijuka, the WFP programme officer for nutrition, says that Ugandans are a generally malnourished population. But for populations still living in their homes, what they eat is at least a matter of choice.
A common feature of the camps is naked children apathetically stubbing forefingers into bowls of cornsoy blended porridge.
The typical meal is maize meal and beans, millet and sorghum, millet, sweet potatoes and cassava or beans and vegetables seasoned in groundnut paste.
Pader is one of the poorest districts in Uganda. Virtually no economic activity takes place there. The entire human population lives in camps.
Whatever agriculture there is, it is restricted to strips of land along the road reserve and only a handful of meters long. The cattle herds were stolen at gunpoint when the war began in the 1980s.
Right in the heartland of the Acholi, the district has seen the worst of the fighting. Its children have been forcibly drafted into both sides of the war. Education is frequently interrupted.
It is a wasteland; the finely crafted St Josephine Bakhita church on the road to Pader town is disappearing under grass and shrub. The road itself is bare earth hemmed in by bush.
The towns are piles of bricks in a dust storm. People's faces are drawn in and blank - the harried looks of those who don't know what the soldiers are going to do to them.
Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Akello, now at Acam's centre, went to harvest sorghum in December 2003 in Pagwere when she was abducted by LRA rebels and forced to carry loads to Ogom - a few days walk from the Sudan border.
In the bush, her role was food-gathering - for the rebel ranks have now turned to foraging for cassava, millet, sorghum, potatoes, edible and inedible leaves, anything to stay alive.
THE FIRST TIME SHE WAS sent to look for food, Akello dug up the ground with her fingernails to get at shrunken cassava tubers.
The next time they sent her without an escort, she escaped. She is now in Primary Five, six years behind her compatriots in southern and western Uganda.
What happens if you return without food? I asked her.
She lets out a dry, humourless laugh. "If you find food once, you are lucky. The next time you might not find it. Two children who came back without food were cut up with a machete."
Akello says that when they chance upon a rice field, the rebels jerk up the rice-ears. They boil them so the husks flake off and then chew the half cooked rice. When they stop to cook meat - chicken or rats - the boiling meat is tied up with a string that runs out of the pot and is fastened to the waist of a captive, so that if they are ambushed while cooking and everyone runs, they don't lose the food.
"The commanders, who are called 'tutors,' eat first," says Akello, "as the rank-and-file waits. Something might be left. Most often, nothing is left.
In the bush, life tends to be one meal a week and, crazed by hunger, the rank-and-file stuff grass and leaves into their mouth and continue fighting."
The escaped children who turn up at the counselling centre are mostly severely malnourished. "They complain of stomachaches and headaches," says Acam. "They all have dysentery; most pass blood and water in their stool."
Without clean water and a good sanitary environment, Kaijuka adds, the effects of hunger are worsened.
"Malnutrition can occur over a long period of time," he says. "What is happening in northern Uganda is that a lot of children have not been eating properly over a long period of time. The nutrition problem is exacerbated by poor living conditions due to congestion and poor hygiene and health care practices."
Even with its budget stretched, the WFP meets only a fraction of the people's food needs.
According to Davies, the people in the camps are capable of meeting 26 per cent of their calorie needs. What the organisation provides is calculated to meet the other 74 per cent.
But the food given by the WFP is also, for most inmates, a potential commodity of trade. They are forced to sell the food to buy charcoal.
Some of the maize becomes raw material for brewing beer as mothers look for money to buy soap and medicine.
The UPDF, however, charges that within the camps there are inmates who smuggle out the little food given to them by the WFP to the LRA.
The interns deny this and accuse the army of sometimes dressing up as rebels and taking food from them, as they try to find out who gives food to the LRA.
Davies says that, in the long run, the people must start to produce their own food. He manages the situation by ensuring that he has a two-month stockpile at any one time, and is constantly lobbying for support.
He says that the social breakdown from the food crisis has been extensive. "There is a great deal of psychological damage," Davies says. "There is breakdown of families, with men feeling unable to provide for their families; there is alcoholism; some men have deserted their families - people leaving to go to Kampala or Masindi to look for casual labour. We haven't always had a problem on this scale. I have brought people here from Rome who have travelled elsewhere in the world and I have heard them say this is the worst human suffering they have ever seen. It is a uniquely savage conflict."
TKIDEGA LIVED IN Oraotwilo, six kilometres away from the camp. Today, he says that he frequently suffers from malaria, stomachaches and dysentery.
He says that going out to look for food is risky because, "If the army catches you, they give you up to 100 lashes and force you to sleep in the cold till morning. We're living like prisoners here, to die one by one. We can work for ourselves and feed our children if they allow us to go home.
The WFP cannot give the interns every thing they need. The organisation spends most of its money not on food but in transporting it, including hiring security.
It costs $529 to ferry every tonne of food aid. Between January and September 2004 alone, it brought 19,000 tonnes, costing $10 million.
The monthly average food distribution of food is 16,500 tonnes, adding up to 146,319 tonnes for the whole of 2004. WFP spends on average $26 million buying food locally for the displaced.
With 90 per cent of the interns unable to provide for themselves, the WFP is asking for 452,508 tonnes of food for the next three years, in a programme that foresees the war coming to an end and people resettled back home. It is expected to cost $263 million. Of this, food alone will cost $118 million.
The war costs the Acholi region alone $100 million a year in lost productivity. The land available to the interns lies in a radius of 2 km around each camp.
The WFP estimates that what is available to each family is only 0.2 hectares of land borrowed or rented. The maximum grain production, it is estimated, is only enough to cover three months for a family of seven.
The Irish charity organisation, GOAL, reported that private livestock ownership has dried up. The hundreds of thousands of animals once found here are down to double or single-digit figures.
At the beginning of 2003, GOAL counted 109 chicken in Kalongo - a few kilometres from Pajule - 80 goats, 14 cattle, seven milking cows and one duck. A year later, there were 15 chicken, 10 goats, four cows and one duck.
Four months before the June 2003 debacle, 60 per cent of the population relied on the sale of their food crops as a source of income. The figure fell to 8.7 per cent by the end of 2003. The sale of firewood was a fallback for most of them, but not for those trapped in camps like Pajule.
Politicians from the north also accuse the southern-dominated government of not caring about how the children in the region - seen as a rival political territory - suffer.
"The children in northern part of Uganda cannot compare with those from the rest of the country," says MP Alice Alasu.
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"The understanding of a 16-year old in the camps is only comparable to that of a six-year-old elsewhere. We have asked the government to pay fees and to provide food and security. But even the little that is given by donors is cut down or not given at all. There is a need to understand that this is a country for everyone."
The MPs from the Acholi sub-region claim that behind the encampment of the population is a sinister plot to grab their land.
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