Uganda 
Warning of unprecedented hunger in Uganda

afrol News, 30 October - The sharp increase in fighting in Northern Uganda since June is about to create "severe food shortages and unprecedented hunger" in the region, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) today warned. Civilians and aid organisations have been especially targeted by the ruthless LRA rebels.

The escalation of the conflict since June had caused "almost daily raids on displacement camps and refugee settlements," according to WFP. The UN agency says these attacks by rebels from the so-called Lord Resistance Army (LRA) usually involve a brutal mix of abductions, executions and the widespread destruction of property, leaving thousands of people homeless and destroying belongings and crops across the region. 

- People in Northern Uganda are already suffering horribly as a result of the fighting, and the destruction of their crops is having a terrible effect on their nutritional condition, said Ken Davies of WFP. "All the stocks from the previous harvest have been exhausted, and no additional food production is expected during the following year." 

WFP, which is the only humanitarian agency with access to camps and settlements beyond the two main towns in the region, says it does not have the necessary resources to continue providing all the urgently needed assistance. The agency urged donors to come forward with urgent contributions and was seeking 18,000 tonnes of food for over half a million people until the end of the year. 

The agency further said it had already been forced to reduce food rations being distributed in Gulu district by 30 percent and warned that if the funding situation did not improve, further cuts were envisaged in other areas next month, "resulting in complete lack of food security for the vulnerable people of the affected region." 

Fighting in Northern Uganda intensified earlier this year after the Ugandan army had launched a mayor offensive against LRA bases in Southern Sudan, with the blessing of the Sudanese government. The offensive, although initially successful, did not manage to root out the rebel units, which returned to Northern Uganda and launched a counter-offensive against civilians there.

According to a paper published yesterday by the US-based group Human Rights Watch, the new LRA offensive had specialised in targeting "displaced persons and refugees and the agencies assisting them." The group estimates that, by September 2002, some 552,000 Ugandans were displaced or at risk of having no harvest.

The LRA rebel group was founded 14 years ago as a religious-ethnic reaction to the regime of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. LRA founder Joseph Kony mixed Christian and traditional spiritualism with ethnic resentments among the Northern Ugandan Acholi people against Mr Museveni's overthrow of the northerner, Milton Obote. 

Spiritualism soon developed into fanaticism in the mind of Mr Kony, who still leads the rebel group. Over the years, LRA became famous for its numerous abductions of children - at least ten thousand - and brutalising them into child soldiers. Mutilations and other blind LRA attacks on civilians have also been daily events in war-ravaged Northern Uganda over the past decade.

Sources: Based on WFP and afrol archives

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