UGANDA: Olara Otunnu says children are real victims of war [news]
[LONDON, 18 January 2006] - The worst place in the world to be a child today is northern Uganda, the former UN representative for children in war said, blaming rebels and government forces for trapping an entire population in a nightmare of terror, disease and death.
Rebels have kidnapped more than 20,000 children for use as soldiers, sex slaves and porters while the government is keeping hundreds of thousands of others in squalid camps where disease and violence are rampant. "When adults wage war children pay the highest price," Olara Otunnu said in a speech in London. "Children are the primary victims of armed conflict."
Almost 2 million people have been "herded like animals" into the camps in northern Uganda where 1,000 people are dying a week due to disease and violence, Otunnu said. He added that rape by government troops, many of them HIV positive, was common.
The government says the camps were set up a decade ago to protect local people from attacks and abductions by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), whose 19-year insurgency has taken a horrific toll on northern Uganda's Acholi population. Otunnu, who comes from northern Uganda, accused President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, of forcing the Acholi people into the camps in a deliberate campaign to wipe them out. The government strongly denied this.
"An entire society is being destroyed in full view of the international community," Otunnu said, calling on Western leaders to demand the Ugandan government dismantle the camps and send in international monitors. Otunnu said there were 200 camps. The government said there were 100.
Ugandan Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Oryem Henry Okello dismissed Otunnu's claims, saying people had gone to the camps to escape LRA atrocities. "It's absolutely true that the situation in northern Uganda is appalling," said Okello, himself an Acholi and a lawmaker for the northern Kitgum district. "What is not true is that there's (a) genocidal project to destroy the Acholi people."
Otunnu, who was UN Under Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict from 1997 to 2005, said the situation in northern Uganda was far worse than in Sudan's troubled Darfur region.
In Darfur, tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2 million forced from their homes since 2003. "The UN said recently that the death rate in northern Uganda is twice that of Darfur," he said. "Northern Uganda has the worst infant mortality in the world today".
[Source: Reuters]
To read the article in full, go to: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=7023
Rebels have kidnapped more than 20,000 children for use as soldiers, sex slaves and porters while the government is keeping hundreds of thousands of others in squalid camps where disease and violence are rampant. "When adults wage war children pay the highest price," Olara Otunnu said in a speech in London. "Children are the primary victims of armed conflict."
Almost 2 million people have been "herded like animals" into the camps in northern Uganda where 1,000 people are dying a week due to disease and violence, Otunnu said. He added that rape by government troops, many of them HIV positive, was common.
The government says the camps were set up a decade ago to protect local people from attacks and abductions by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), whose 19-year insurgency has taken a horrific toll on northern Uganda's Acholi population. Otunnu, who comes from northern Uganda, accused President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, of forcing the Acholi people into the camps in a deliberate campaign to wipe them out. The government strongly denied this.
"An entire society is being destroyed in full view of the international community," Otunnu said, calling on Western leaders to demand the Ugandan government dismantle the camps and send in international monitors. Otunnu said there were 200 camps. The government said there were 100.
Ugandan Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Oryem Henry Okello dismissed Otunnu's claims, saying people had gone to the camps to escape LRA atrocities. "It's absolutely true that the situation in northern Uganda is appalling," said Okello, himself an Acholi and a lawmaker for the northern Kitgum district. "What is not true is that there's (a) genocidal project to destroy the Acholi people."
Otunnu, who was UN Under Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict from 1997 to 2005, said the situation in northern Uganda was far worse than in Sudan's troubled Darfur region.
In Darfur, tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2 million forced from their homes since 2003. "The UN said recently that the death rate in northern Uganda is twice that of Darfur," he said. "Northern Uganda has the worst infant mortality in the world today".
[Source: Reuters]
To read the article in full, go to: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=7023
posted by Jennifer at 6:18 PM
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