Uganda 'as bad as Darfur'
2004-09-10 21:45
Nairobi - The humanitarian situation in northern Uganda, where the government is battling Lord's Resistant Army (LRA) rebels, is just as bad as one in Sudan's western Darfur region, the US government's aid agency said on Friday.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Andrew Natsios said the Ugandan conflict, which has spawned what the United Nations has described as the world's forgotten humanitarian crisis on earth, is "actually as bad as Darfur."
"At the same time we (USAID) are focussing our attention on humanitarian assistance in Darfur, we are also focussing in northern Uganda," Natsios told a press conference in Nairobi.
He insisted that the US and other human rights groups have done several human rights and humanitarian assessments on northern Uganda, but the press has ignored publicising them.
Around 1.6 million villagers have been displaced in northern Uganda and most of them live in squalid camps dotting the region, which are often attacked by the LRA in hit-and-run raids.
Natsios said indications were that the LRA was weakening, following intensive raids by the Ugandan army.
"Recently, there have been serious military setbacks for the LRA, commanders are giving up, troops are giving up and I think we are beginning to see the end of the movement," he said.
The LRA took over the leadership of northern Uganda's rebellion in 1988, two years into a conflict fuelled by the perceived economic marginalisation of the region by Kampala.
The group distinguishes itself by its brutality and its total absence of a public political face, a characteristic that makes negotiating an end to the war all but impossible.
The LRA has said it wants to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni's government and replace it with a regime based on the Bible's Ten Commandments.