Relief agencies working in northern Uganda on Thursday urged the government to dismantle camps housing displaced persons, saying they lacked adequate security.
The camps ”have outlived their usefulness,” the agencies and other non-governmental organisations said in statement presented to the visiting United Nations’ special envoy on displaced people, Francis Deng, on the final day of his stay here.
”As evident from the too frequent attacks on these camps, resulting in deaths, abductions, rape, bodily harm and looting, due to inadequate protection, it is our considered view that the camps ceased to offer protection as earlier designed by government,” the statement said.
The government introduced what it called ”protected camps” and forced people to move into them, saying it could provide them with better security than when they are scattered.
The aid agencies said Pabbo camp in Gulu district, the biggest in the region with about 60 000 people, was attacked six times in June alone by rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), leaving 20 civilians dead. Another 15 people were abducted.
The LRA has fought the government in Kampala since 1988 to replace it with one based on the biblical Ten Commandments, but has continued to brutalise the northern Ugandan population, forcing more than 800 000 of them to be displaced and are living in squalid camps dotting the region.
Many people have left the camps for the relative safety of towns, where they tend to squat on the outskirts.
An AFP journalist here saw thousands of people, mainly children, sleeping outdoors with little or nothing to cover them in the night chill.
”Hordes of children stream to Gulu every evening from the surrounding villages to seek protection, but our own staff have not been spared either in rebel attacks, and escorts from the army were not forthcoming,” the NGOs said.
”The military are not even able to provide escorts for transport services or aid agencies, without first receiving money for food and fuel,” the 25 NGOs that signed the document told Deng.
The agencies said 41% of children under five in the camps were stunted as a result of chronic malnutrition and that access to water was minimal.
Deng had spent most of the day visiting the Awer camp some 20 kilometres west of Gulu, where about 18 000 people share one borehole and two dilapidated springs.
But Disaster Preparedness Minister Christine Amongin, who accompanied Deng, said the camps could not be shut when the LRA was stepping up abductions and brutal attacks.
Amongin said that dialogue was needed instead to stop Uganda’s unprecedented, brutal civil war.
”Fire will not stop fire. We need to try dialogue to end this suffering,” she said in a rare outburst from a cabinet minister of the government, which has long maintained that a military solution was necessary.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has said that he had only reluctantly allowed a window for talks with the rebels. – Sapa-AFP