Tabu Butagira
13 May 2008
Kampala — The failure by a group of visiting American editors to travel to war-ravaged northern Uganda, has riled leaders in the region who accuse the senior foreign journalists of ignoring the ruinous effects of the two-decade long Lord 's Resistance Army insurgency.
Mr Norbert Mao , chairman of Gulu District , said on Thursday that by skipping northern Uganda, the American media executives were denying the LRA war victims an opportunity to have their plight highlighted in the influential western media.
"We are disappointed with the delegation from major US publications that have deliberately chosen not to travel to northern Uganda," Mr Mao said, " By not going to the north, they [American journalists] are perpetuating the conspiracy of silence [by the government] on the suffering of the people in the north."
Ms Lisa Heilbronn, the press and public affairs officer at the American embassy in Kampala, said they had no influence on the errand of the journalists being sponsored by International Reporters Project (IRP) of the Washington D.C.-based John Hopkins University.
"The [journalists] programme is purely private and we cannot influence what they are doing," she said yesterday.
IRP in a statement on its website announcing the 10-day "Gate Keepers" fellowship to Uganda, said the American managing/news editors and senior producers would focus on health, agriculture, development and environmental/climate change issues.
"Africa is consistently under-covered in the US media, and our aim is to open [American] editors' eyes to the wide variety of important stories there [on the continent]," John Schidlovsky, the director of IRP, who has accompanied the team, is quoted as saying.
The Country Director of Uganda Radio Network, Mr Sam Guma, who is the official host of the journalists, said yesterday there was no ill motive to black out northern Uganda since the LRA war is "certainly big news" in the country.
"It is not that the editors will be reporting news stories during the visit (rather) the tour is to generate enough interest and enable them decide where to send their news reporters," he said.
And he added: "If the (American) editors find this tour interesting, they will dedicate more resources of their media houses to cover the stories in Uganda I can see that is going to happen."
The US news managers drawn from the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Congressional Quarterly, the BBC, Oprah Magazine, Yahoo, Rocky Mountain news in Colorado, Newsweek International, National Geographic, Business week and a New York city public radio, on Sunday met President Yoweri Museveni at State House, Entebbe and they raised questions on Uganda's anti-HIV/Aids fight, commercial agriculture and security.
They also visited Budongo Forest reserve in mid-western Uganda to assess first hand the impact of global warming in the tropics and chronicle the experiences of communities living at the edge of protected zones. Their visit, which opened on May 3, ends tomorrow.
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