I recently returned from a visit to northern Uganda, where more than 20 years of war has had a disastrous and tragic impact on people in the north. I found much cause for concern and some glimmers of hope.
As you probably know, the Ugandan army has been battling for nearly two decades a brutal rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army or LRA in a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly two million from their homes.
The LRA is known for its terrible attacks on villages and its abduction and abuse of more than 30,000 children who were forced to become frontline soldiers, porters or sex slaves for the rebels.
Many of the children we’re now assisting suffered torture and were made to do the unthinkable, like killing family members, raping neighbors and torching their own villages.
For its part, the government herded the mostly Acholi population into camps, claiming it would be a temporary safety measure while the army hunted down LRA fighters. But that was many years ago and nearly 90 percent of northerners remain in squalid camps that are breeding grounds for disease and misery. Earlier this year, the Ugandan government and the LRA finally sat down for peace negotiations and in August agreed to a truce that is largely being heeded. It was in this atmosphere of hope that I led a delegation to Uganda that included former Senator John Edwards (right), IRC board co-chair Winston Lord, who served as a foreign policy advisor in the Nixon, Regan, Bush and Clinton administrations, and a number of others interested in Uganda’s future.
Our first stop was volatile Kitgum District where the IRC launched programs in 1998 to help children who escaped LRA captivity recover and find their families. John Edwards sat down to talk to some of the children at Palabek Camp about their experiences.
At Palabek, congestion and poor water and sanitation contribute to deplorable conditions and spiraling mortality. The IRC’s health facilities at the camp provide the only available health services for thousands of people, like this mother who had just given birth to twins.
The next stop on our visit, Lira District, provided a significant contrast. Calm has returned to this area and people have begun returning home. I had the chance to meet with Elestina and Justino Otim who, with their six children and 10 grandchildren, recently returned to their small plot of land just several miles from the crowded and fetid camp where they had fled five years earlier. Justino said life was terrible there, but that they were too afraid to leave, until recently. Now the family is rebuilding their looted and burned-down huts and trying to put their lives back together.
Elestina told me that for the first time in a long time she feels free. But in the same breath she said she is very worried about her family. They have no food and it will take some time before they can grow vegetables to eat and sell. The closest functioning well is two miles away and is shared by three villages. The nearest clinic has no drugs.
Still there is desperate optimism that the peace process will succeed. I could see the hope in the eyes of the children who are studying again in IRC education programs.
It is also very heartening to see these young people, some of them former child soldiers, learn new marketable skills. Here, my colleague George Angolli is giving encouragement to Alfred, who is in an IRC carpentry course.
Once we returned to the capital, Kampala, Senator Edwards, the other delegates and I had the chance to meet with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. We described the conditions in the north and the need for a genuine and robust peace and reconciliation process. We also urged that he make recovery in the north a priority. We discussed how, if peace is achieved, hundreds of thousands of people like Justino and Elestina are going to be streaming back to their long neglected villages and the humanitarian needs in these forsaken places will be massive.
All of the IRC's dedicated staff members in Uganda, like field coordinator Monica Asekenya (right), remain committed to providing lifesaving aid and recovery assistance for the people of the northern both in the camps to which they have fled and in the homes to which they return.
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