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.
Kony's fighters, acting with a calculated cruelty worse than the limb-hacking rebel armies of 1990s Sierra Leone, have cut off the lips, breasts, and hands of their victims. Fearful of abduction, tens of thousands of children leave their villages and camps each afternoon, walking miles to sleep in the safety of larger towns, and then hiking back to their homes after sunrise. Ugandan authorities say the insurgency is on its last legs. They said the same thing last year, and the year before.
On the streets of Gulu, a dusty northern town that's been ground zero for much of the conflict, former child soldiers lift their shirts to show their battle stripes: bullet and shrapnel wounds, latticework scars from whippings at the hands of LRA thugs. Many believe Kony has magical powers--that he can predict the future, can still see them from afar. "They are dominated by spirit control," says Johnny Lecambel, a local radio host who uses his program to coax fighters out of the bush and back to their villages, where they are guaranteed amnesty by Ugandan law.
A wanted man. Last October, the International Criminal Court indicted Kony and four commanders for crimes against humanity, a move that in practical terms may have made matters worse. The indictments effectively ended peace negotiations with the LRA and created obstacles to quiet efforts for the surrender of midlevel officers and the children they command. It's not clear who can bring Kony to justice, since Uganda's Army has failed for two decades. Neighboring Sudan, which publicly broke ties with Kony after a decade of support, hasn't gone after LRA fighters operating from its territory--despite continued attacks on aid workers and villagers in southern Sudan. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Kony is said to be hiding now, barely functions as a state.
At the Labuje displaced person camp in Uganda's Kitgum district, some 17,655 people live as de facto prisoners on 8 acres of thatched-roof huts and hard-packed mud. "Of course I fear going back home," says Margaret Okello, who's raising two children and the orphaned child of a friend. "The rebels are still there in small groups. They are still doing atrocities." Others, though, are taking advantage of the LRA's current low ebb, leaving the unhygienic safety of the camps for risky freedom in the fields. The Ugandan government says that over time, most will feel secure enough to do the same. Former LRA fighters say this is exactly what Kony wants--a new crop of potential abductees to feed a new decade of fear.
For more on the children in northern Uganda: www.usnews.com/uganda
This story appears in the May 8, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.