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UN to Beef Up North Presence

New Vision (Kampala)
NEWS
November 24, 2005
Posted to the web November 28, 2005
Nairobi
The United Nations plans to increase its presence and programmes in northern
Uganda in 2006, to help some two million people displaced by conflict, the UN
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced on Monday.
"This is one of the longest, largest, and least addressed humanitarian crises
in the world today," said Dennis McNamara, special advisor on displacement to
the UN emergency relief coordinator, in a statement.
"It has uprooted as many people as the Bosnian war did 10 years ago, but gets
only a fraction of the international attention," added McNamara, who had just
spent a week in Uganda.
He also visited Kitgum district near the Sudanese border, where two NGO workers
were killed in recent weeks by rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).
Nearly two million people have been displaced by the 19-year-long conflict
between the Ugandan government and the LRA. Some 1.7 million live in over 200
squalid and overcrowded camps and rely largely on international assistance to
survive.
OCHA noted that a July 2005 mortality survey by the Ugandan ministry of health
and the World Health Organisation estimated that more than 1,000 people die in
the camps from disease or violence each week.
The UN plans to increase its presence in the country primarily through its main
humanitarian organisations - UNICEF, the UNHCR, OCHA and the UN Office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The UN would also increase its request for funding for humanitarian programmes
to more than US $200 million for 2006.

   

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