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Uganda: Displaced People in the North Struggle for Basic Needs
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25 April 2006
Posted to the web 25 April 2006
Margaret McElligott
Gulu, Uganda
Caroline Akoko has lived for almost two years at a camp for people fleeing their homes in northern Uganda, where 18 years of war between government forces and a rebel group has caused widespread terror and destruction.
"It was on a daily basis that they attacked the village," said Akoko, referring to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a shadowy, guerrilla force composed largely of children kidnapped from the surrounding area and forced to fight. "They can kill your child. They can kill your husband. They can ask you for any amount of money and even if [you honestly don't have it], they can kill you."
The last time the LRA attacked her village, Akoko said, they grabbed her husband, tied his hands behind his back, and threatened him until she came up with enough money to win his freedom. She still bears the scars of a bayonet stab on her left calf.
Displaced residents of northern Uganda - called, in the parlance of international aid workers, "internally displaced persons", or IDPs for short - say they are rapidly losing hope that the war will end soon and are struggling to make do in congested camps with insufficient food and water.
"People are not happy to stay in the camp, but they stay because there is no way out," said Ronald Nyeko, camp leader at the 11,981-strong Alokolum IDP camp outside Gulu.
People first started fleeing to Alokolum in 1996, but the camp was not registered until October 2004. Many residents arrived in 2003 after the army issued orders requiring displaced people living in nearby villages to move to the camp.
The conflict in the north has been driven by the persistence of the LRA, despite numerous government offensives against the group. More than one million people are living in IDP camps, and about 25,000 children have been abducted, tortured, raped and forced to bear arms in a war that the UN has called "the world's worst forgotten crisis."
Regardless of the dangers and daily attacks, Akoko said she would have preferred to stay in her village to ride out of the storm of the war, because at least she would have had some land to till. As it is, she rents a small, nearby plot to grow okra, peas and greens to sell by the roadside.
The lack of land is a recurring complaint in the IDP camps. At Alokolum, residents cannot leave a four-kilometer radius around the camp, but at other camps, the ring of safety is only two kilometers.
The camps are safer than the villages, but still fall under LRA attack, as the residents of Alokolum found out last February. Three residents were killed by the LRA and some children were abducted, Nyeko said.
For Paicho camp resident Rose Adong, the safety of camp has been elusive.
In 1999, two of her daughters, aged 12 and 13, were kidnapped by the LRA and forced to join the rebel force. Adong's elder daughter fled the LRA camp at night, trying to escape her captors. Unfortunately, she got lost in the darkness and wandered back into the LRA area, where she was caught. As a punishment and lesson to other abductees, the 12-year-old was forced to kill her older sister. Adong said she learned the story many years later, when her surviving daughter escaped and returned to Paicho.
Adong said she welcomed the return of her daughter, regardless of what had happened, but that some members of the community worried that the young woman had been permanently damaged by years of violence and represented a threat.
"Then there was no rehabilitation," Adong said, referring to the rehabilitation centers built in Gulu that help former combatants readjust to civilian life. "It was not easy for her because people would imagine that she had a disturbed mind because she was with the rebels all that time when she was a girl."
Most camp leaders said that LRA attacks do not last long, as the combatants shoot, loot and run, often with the army right on their tail.
Although the Ugandan Peoples' Defense Force provides protection to the IDP camps, the soldiers can be another form of torment for camp dwellers.
"Even the army themselves, they are trying to infringe on the rights of the people," said Paicho camp leader Vincent Opwonya. "They beat you when they find you at night, so you must be indoors. Even on Christmas Day itself, two soldiers [fighting over a woman] fired guns which almost hit people."
In Lalogi camp, 15 people were killed late last year when the army opened fire on residents protesting the death of an 18-year-old boy, according to Ugandan radio. An army official in Kampala told the BBC that the boy was shot late at night, when he was mistaken for a rebel, but did not offer an explanation for the deaths of the unarmed demonstrators the following day.
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