20 February 2004
Lira — Northern Uganda's most economically prosperous town, Lira Municipality, has been brought to a near standstill by a recent spate of attacks by rebels on civilian targets in its surrounding areas, residents said on Thursday.
Local leaders said social services had been overstretched by an influx of people displaced from rural areas seeking shelter from rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) attacks. Traders and small business owners in Lira said trade with neighbouring districts had dwindled sharply because of the insecurity.
Peter Owiny, the mayor of Lira told IRIN that the town's schools and hospitals, which had flourished since the beginning of the 1990s, were now crumbling under the pressure brought to bear on them by the increased population. "The population of Lira is officially 90,000, but with the displaced, it is now up to 350,000. The little revenue we collect is not enough to go around," Owiny said, "The schools we used to have for 2,000 children now squeeze [in] 5,000. The hospital designed for 20,000 is overcrowded to bursting point."
He added that the more productive areas of the villages around Lira had been worst hit by the insurgency, a situation which was now leading to food shortages.
Morris Odung, the news editor of Radio Lira, the town's oldest media station, told IRIN that food shortages were becoming serious for the poor. "Food has become too expensive for many people. Production in the villages has stopped as people flee the massacres. The people of the rural areas were the granary of the district; now they are turned just into hungry mouths," he said.
Peter Okello, who operates a town-centre timber business, which had been growing rapidly since 2000, enabling him to double the size of his outlet, said Lira's recent insecurity "has scared away all my customers". "Transporters are fearing to come here, so we have lost most of our suppliers as well," he added.
The LRA intensified its operations against Lira District last November with a series of brutal attacks on villages, internally displaced person (IDP) camps and trading centres. Most recently, the rebels attacked Abia camp, 30 km from Lira, killing about 50 people by shooting, hacking, burning or bludgeoning them to death.
The rebels, a cult-like group led by a mystic recluse, Joseph Kony, says it is fighting to better the lot of the people in the north, yet most of its attacks have targeted civilians from the regions they claim to be liberating.
Observers say Lira has been targeted because the rebels ran out of food after the government army forced them out of the Teso region to the southeast of Lira, right up towards the Sudan border, where food is scarce. Lira is a corridor between Teso and the country's far north.
The minister of state for disaster preparedness, Christine Aporu, told IRIN work was under way to try and relieve congestion in Lira town by moving some of the IDPs into camps outside the town.
But many have resisted plans for relocation, citing adverse conditions in the camps, and security concerns. Efforts by the government to move residents of the urban settlement of Erute to camps in the surrounding countryside have been met with fierce resistance, local government officials say.
Meanwhile, residents in camps outside Lira town have told IRIN conditions are appalling, made so by lack of food, water, sanitation and medicine, the combined effects of which are killing scores of children. "I see children dying of cholera every day, and some have died because there is no water - they are drying up. I have personally buried 17 in the last week," Joseph Omara, a catechist for Omoro IDP camp, 60 km east of Lira, which houses about 10,000 people, told IRIN in Ngetta.
Omara said a number of people were being killed by rebel activity as well. "People leave the camps to collect food and that's where they strike," he said, "On Friday [13 February], they killed a boy called Alio. He was just outside the camp, going to get water."
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