----- Original Message ----- 
From: uga749d 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 9:00 PM
Subject: ***NORTHERN TRAGEDY SHOCKS UN BOSS**


      Northern tragedy shocks UN boss 
           
            Yearning for LOVE AND CARE: Egeland meets children in a displaced people's camp in Kitgum on Saturday
           
      By Tim Cocks 
      in kitgum 
      TWENTY-FOUR hours in Kitgum was all it took. As he stepped back onto his chartered plane at Kitgum airstrip, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, concluded that "northern Uganda must be one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world." 

      "I am deeply shocked by what I have seen. 

      "I am shocked by the sheer size of this crisis and the suffering of its victims. This is appaling," Egeland said. 

      He said in the light of what he had seen, he would report back to the UN offices in New York and Geneva with a message that "this conflict must have more international attention." 

      "This is above all a war against children. They are abducted, abused and violated. A total of 8,500 children abducted just this year! That is a catastrophe," he said. 

      Egeland and his team of UN delegates from New York visited camps for the internally displaced people (IDPs) in Kitgum dist! rict. They also saw some of the thousands of "night-time" IDPs - those who live at home during the day and trek into Kitgum town centre each night to sleep out on the streets rather than stay at home and risk being a target for abduction. 

      They then met district officials and international organisations working in the district. 
      Egeland pledged to "more than triple" humanitarian assistance to the troubled region. 

      "We told them we are massively increasing our presence in the north. My own UN department is set to expand from one office in Gulu to four offices in different locations in the north," he said. 

      Egeland said the Ugandan crisis is one of the last "dark spots" for international attention in the world. 

      "Liberia, eastern Congo, all have had significant investment in trying to relieve human suffering. I feel personally bad that I was in Madrid when US$33b was raised for Iraq in a single day. Yet this crisis is in many ways worse than Ira! q," he said. 

      But he added that Uganda needed to do more to gua rantee the security of aid workers. 
      "Poor security is still the single biggest constraint on aid. Unless the government of Uganda can guarantee safe passage for humanitarian workers, none of this extra money for helping the people of the north is going to achieve anything," Egeland said. 

      Kitgum Resident District Commissioner Lt. Okot Lapolo admitted that not enough had been done to improve security. 

      "We will definitely try to improve security. We recognise this has been a failing of ours," he said. 
      Ends

      Published on: Monday, 10th November, 2003
     
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Gook 

"You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."- Malcom X 




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