More than 10 000 people were forced out of a camp for people displaced by a rebellion in northern Uganda after a fire burned down thousands of mud and straw huts in the camp, an official said on Thursday.
The fire at the Pabo camp, 400 kilometres north of Kampala, began on Tuesday when a little girl lit a small fire with some dry grass to warm some food, said Walter Ochola, a local official. The girl, like many of the children in the camp, had been left alone when her parents went to collect food at a nearby UN World Food Program depot.
The huts in the camp, where about 64 000 people live, are packed close together and are especially flammable in the dry season. When a gust of wind carried some of the burning grass onto a nearby hut, the fire spread quickly, burning down thousands of the small dwellings before it was extinguished, Ochola said.
The people whose huts burned down are currently sleeping in fields on the edges of the camp, one of the largest in northern Uganda, he said Nearly a million people are living camps for people displaced by fighting between the Ugandan army and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.
The rebels are remnants of a rebellion in the north that erupted after President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, seized power in 1986 after a five-year bush war.
Fighting intensified last March after government forces launched ”Operation Iron Fist” against rebel bases in southern Sudan, forcing the rebels back into northern Uganda. Officials claimed the rebels would be finished in a few months.
But fighting has dragged on and efforts to start peace talks have stalled.
Aid agencies working in the north estimate that the conflict has killed more than 23 000 people and cost the East African nation $1,3-billion since 1986. – Sapa-AP