III. OTHER EFFECTS OF THE CONFLICT IN THE NORTH

Piny dong oloyo acholi woko pi lweny man.

("The Acholi are helpless because of the insecurity in the north.")

-Title of a song written by children at the World Vision Center at Kiryandongo

Who will protect us? Even in Amin's time, we were not killed like this.

- Hon. Livingstone Okello-Okello, MP for Kitgum

Abducted children are not the only victims of the conflict in the north. The conflict, which has now persisted for over a decade, has taken the lives of thousands of civilians of all ages. Some have been killed by the rebels during raids; others have been caught in the crossfire between rebels and government soldiers. While at times several weeks go by with few rebel attacks, during other periods, the death toll is astounding: during a single two-week period in July 1996, for instance, violence took the lives of forty soldiers, thirty-two rebels and 225 civilians. Between January 6 and January 10, 1997, 400 civilians were slaughtered during a rebel attack in Kitgum.

Northern Uganda today faces an acute humanitarian crisis. The two northern districts of Gulu and Kitgum, the homeland of the Acholi people, have been hardest hit: relief agencies estimate that over 240,000 people are currently displaced from their homes and villages,while some local officials estimate that the figure is as high as two million displaced people.In Kitgum, nearly half of the displaced people are children, and more than a third of those children have been orphaned by the war.

The infrastructure in Gulu and Kitgum is in a state of collapse. The constant danger of land mines and rebel ambushes has made many of the region's few roads unsafe for travel. Rebel attacks destroyed thousands of homes. Agriculture has come to a standstill in parts of the region, since the insecurity has forced people to flee their homes and abandon their fields.

Education, too, has stopped in many places. The rebels target schools and teachers, and in the last year, in Gulu alone, more than seventy-five schools have been burnt down by the rebels, and 215 teachers have been killed. Many more teachers have been abducted or have fled the region. An estimated 60,000 school-aged children have been displaced, and during 1996, the number of functioning schools in Gulu fell from 199 to sixty-four.

Attacks on schools are an efficient way for the rebels to abduct many children at once. In October 1996, for instance, the rebels raided St. Mary's, a Catholic girls' boarding school in the town of Aboke, in Apac district. The rebels arrived in the middle of the night, and entered the school through a window. They destroyed a of school vehicle, ransacked the school clinic, attempted to burn down a number of school buildings, and abducted 139 girls, aged mostly fifteen to seventeen.The scale of the Aboke abductions was unusual, as was the rebel incursion into Apac, but the rebel tactic of raiding schools is typical, and has gravely disrupted the north's educational system.

The health care system in the north, always rudimentary, has almost collapsed. Many of those who are wounded in the fighting receive little or no medical attention; as a result, figures giving the number of dead and wounded are almost certainly too low, since many deaths and injuries never come to the attention of the authorities. Rebel raids on clinics and dispensaries have diminished the store of medicines available, and the instability has caused many health workers to flee. This has disrupted most basic non-emergency services, including immunization campaigns. Officially, there are thirty rural health units in Gulu, but as of May 1997, only fourteen remained in operation.

The results are predictable: by almost any health care indicator, Gulu and Kitgum lag far behind other parts of Uganda. At the end of 1995, for instance, the infant mortality rate in Gulu was 172 per thousand live births, compared to eighty per thousand live births in Kampala. Most estimates suggest that the HIV infection rate in the region hovers at around 25 percent of the population.And AIDS deaths compound all of the region's other problems, further straining health care resources, rendering immune-compromised people more vulnerable to other diseases, and leaving still more children orphaned.

The health crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the government policy of encouraging civilians to leave rural areas and move to "protected camps" near Uganda People's Defense Force military installations. The rationale behind the protected camps is straightforward: by concentrating the civilian population in a few well-defined areas, the army hopes both to simplify the task of protecting people from rebel attacks and make it harder for the rebels to find food by raiding villages. But in practice, the protected camps have been, at best, a mixed blessing for the internally displaced people of Gulu and Kitgum: tens of thousands of them thronged to the camps, only to find that virtually no provision had been made for sanitation or sustenance.

In the protected camp at Pabbo, in Gulu district, for instance, a displaced population of over 30,000 relies for water on only two boreholes, one of which was not functional as of May. The likelihood of any improvement in the situation is minimal, because the district lacks the staff and equipment to fix breakdowns: according to the Gulu Disaster Management Committee, "most of the [district's] field crew were laid off in the recent restructuring exercise [and] all the vehicles attached to the water dept. in this district are broken down except one which is moving but in very bad mechanical condition." Along with the paltry water supply in Pabbo, no latrines had been created for the camp. And Pabbo is not unusual; according to the Gulu Disaster Management Committee, "[T]he whole situation is pathetic . . . . Suffering in long queues, and swamps of flies over the stinking garbage and human excreta is the order of the day in most camps."

Unsurprisingly, limited water, poor sanitary facilities and minimal provision of medical care in the protected camps has led to thousands of deaths each month. Ten of the twenty-four camps in Gulu district are situated in areas with no health care facilities at all, and a recent survey in three of the camps found that 41.9 percent of the children were malnourished. Epidemics of measles, malaria and dysentery kill off many of the weakest in the camps In Pabbo alone, there were more than four thousand deaths during the month of February 1997 (more recent figures are not available).

A local doctor's words give some sense of the scope of the humanitarian crisis in the north:

In 1995, we saw a total of 335 war injuries at this hospital. In 1996, we saw 117 victims of land mines, and 515 gunshot wounds. This year, from January through late April, we saw fourteen mine victims and 155 other war wound victims. Remember those are just the people who we see--most people never come to the hospital.

The majority of children come to us because of the indirect effects of the war. When there is inadequate food, children are usually the first to become ill. We see epidemics, malnutrition, malaria, and most of the outbreaks start in the protected camps. More children are sick, and those who are sick are sicker than usual. Now the malnutrition wards are full of children from the camps. In the camps, children are very sick; many of them are dying. Most of them never get to the hospital.

The government thought that protected camps would deny the rebels access to support and information, but it was done in such a hurry, and without planning, that really it was a source of great suffering to the people. Last year, when people began surging to the towns, the population in Gulu town swelled by 70,000 people, and a measles epidemic struck. About 20 percent of the children brought into the hospital died. In the villages, maybe half of the children who got sick died, because they got no medical care.

If there had been prior planning, if there had been planning for sanitation, food, water, and medicines . . . . but by herding people into the camps, just like that, this cost a lot of lives. Some of the camps have only a few soldiers nearby, and people say, "They are using us as human shields." So if the rebels try to attack the soldiers, it is civilians who are killed. And if the people leave the camp, if they even just go home for a day to try to find food, then they are targeted by the rebels for having gone to the camps. Many people lose their lives that way.

The problem is that we don't see an end to the problem. When you have a problem and you think it's coming to an end, then you say, let's persevere. But I really don't see how this is going to end. I foresee unlimited suffering . . . the last two years have been the worst in ten years. We cannot do anything, we cannot go outside in the community, we cannot do our work. We are trapped, we can't move on the roads. So now the sense of hopelessness is the biggest problem with the people. And this is the easiest situation for the rebels to operate in. The people have no will except to surrender.

It has to stop, it must stop. It is painful to live in a place where the rebels are around, and you have to hide your own children in the bush and bring food to them, to try to keep them safe. The rebels' main interest is in the children, it's how they recruit. Children are malleable, they can be easily managed. The rebels don't care if some die: they just abduct more. And there is really no protection for these children. If they were taking adults, I would not care as much, I would perhaps say that this kind of thing is just part of the problem with us here in Uganda--but these children are just used. They are not the ones who voted for Museveni. If our country is troubled the fault is not theirs.

When you are in the medical field, you are trained always to look for solutions. But I cannot see one here.

According to Paulinus Nyeko of Gulu Human Rights Focus, civilians frequently complain of harassment and human rights abuses by the Ugandan People's Defense Force, including robbery, rape and torture.Since the focus of our investigation was on the abduction of children, we were not able to look into these charges, but we asked military officials if they were aware of them. Lieutenant Bantirinza Shaban, the public relations officer for the UPDF in Gulu, confirmed that he was aware of such allegations, and attributed any such incidents to "communication problems" stemming from "ethnic difficulties and language differences."

Colonel James Kazini, commander of the UPDF Fourth Division, had a different explanation: he attributed such abuses to the Acholi soldiers, saying, "If anything, it is local Acholi soldiers causing the problems. It's the cultural background of the people here: they are very violent. It's genetic." He expressed his regret that Ugandan law prohibits summary justice against soldiers found to have committed abuses: "We used to have field court martials, and try and sentence them right in the market place. We used to just kill them. But now the president does not allow it . . . soldiers accused of misbehaving are taken to the police and charged."