When Help Is Not On The Way
While the world rallies for Darfur, there are other places of horror and neglect
KITGUM, UGANDA--Fred Bokilo can almost see home from the edge of the squalid camp where he has lived for three years. Swollen-bellied children run past him. There's cholera in the water, and malaria in the huts. Two miles away, his fields lie untilled, and that's how they'll stay. "Of course I can't go back," he says, warning of the armed bands roaming freely outside town. "They will kill you. ... They take your boys. They take your girls."
Constant fear of marauders who murder, rape, pillage, and enslave. Legions sweeping into camps. Sexual violence as a weapon of war. Thinking of Darfur? Think again. Northern Uganda, home to a festering, cultlike insurgency, is the worst disaster you've never heard of. As many as 200,000 people have died by violence and disease since 2000. Some 1.6 million--95 percent of the northern population--are afraid to leave crowded camps for their homes and fields.
If these statistics sound familiar, it's because they are roughly the same as those in Darfur, the strife-torn western region of Sudan that has become the humanitarian cause celebre in western nations. There is no denying that Darfur is a place of horror on a vast scale--and worthy of world attention--but, sadly, it is not unique in suffering. Mortality rates in northern Uganda are three times as high as in Darfur, and the international presence here is far lower. U.S. emergency humanitarian aid to Darfur this year, not counting food, will exceed $150 million. In Uganda, it may reach $7 million.
Why such a disparity? Michael Poffenberger of the Africa Faith and Justice Network cites the "politics of humanitarianism," a feedback loop of grass-roots activists, elected officials, aid workers, and the media. "Certain crises are in style and others are not, regardless of the number of people dying or the scale of the disaster."
The quiet one. In the case of Sudan, a wrenching civil war in its southern region produced a two-decade-long alliance of relief groups, Christian activists, and U.S. policymakers calling attention to that humanitarian disaster. When the fighting in Sudan's western Darfur region rose to prominence in 2004, just as Sudan's civil war ended, there was a ready-made engine of advocacy and response, one made all the more potent by assertions that the killing rises to the level of genocide. Darfur's narrative of "Arab versus African," while overly simplistic, is easy enough to grasp. Uganda's crisis developed almost unnoticed over the course of a 20-year insurgency. It has clear victims and villains, but few easy prescriptions.
While the Ugandan government and the international community share the blame for wretched camp conditions, the principal author of this misery is Joseph Kony, whose Lord's Resistance Army has abducted an estimated 25,000 children for use as soldiers and sex slaves. Many are forced to kill a parent or a sibling, a trauma that compels them to accept new lives as cannon fodder and concubines.
Kony is a former altar boy who took over an earlier tribal rebellion of disaffected northerners (fighters were told a magical shea butter would protect them from bullets; it didn't). He has styled himself a prophet and spirit-channeler. The spirits tell Kony to punish the Acholi tribe--his own people--for not supporting his war to topple Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. The Ugandan president has been a western favorite, credited with stabilizing much of the country, expanding primary education, and facing up to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But he has drawn criticism recently for a crackdown on political opposition and for his failure to bring peace and improved living conditions to the isolated north.
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