UGANDA-POLITICS: Aid Agencies Pull Out Of Rebel Zones

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jul 4 1996 (IPS) - Relief agencies have been forced to pull out of refugee camps in north-western Uganda following a series of attacks by rebels seeking to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) have withdrawn from three camps around Koboko, a remote town some 600 kilometres northwest of the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Earlier, OXFAM — a British non-governmental organisation (NGO) — was forced to pull out of a camp south of Koboko.

The ICRC said in a statement from its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland that “activities in the three camps for Sudanese refugees in the vicinity have been suspended for the forseeable future.”

“Due to the escalation of violence most of the 35,000 inhabitants of the camps have fled to Koboko town where a skeleton team of Uganda Red Cross and Red Cresent Society (URCS) workers is addressing their most urgent needs,” ran the statement, obtained by IPS this week.

It added that a 30-year old Red Cross worker, Amin Booyi Andawa, was killed during an attack by rebels of the West Nile Bank Front (WNBF) two weeks ago. Shaken by the incident, JRS officials who had been working in the camp quit the area. They also complained that the rebels looted their stores and property.

The WNBF is dominated by people from the West Nile region — Madis, Lubgaras, Aringas and Nubians — who had formed the bulk of the army of ousted dictator Idi Amin. The group’s leader, Col. Juma Oris, was himself a senior official in Amin’s regime.

After Amin’s ouster in 1979, many of his henchmen fled to neighbouring countries, mainly Sudan and Zaire, from where they later infiltrated Uganda.

They made headlines in May, when a group of 300 WNBF rebels who had entered Uganda from southern Sudan raided an army barracks in Koboko, blew up part of a bridge in the West Nile and ambushed an ICRC truck.

Recently an official of a second rebel group that operates in the north of Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), told IPS that the LRA and the WNBF were coordinating their activities against the Ugandan government.

The LRA, headed by herbalist Joseph Kony, began its fight against Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) government in 1987, shortly after the defeat of a rebellion by the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Kony’s cousin Alice Lakwena.

The LRA is dominated by people from the Acholi ethnic group, which straddles the Uganda/Sudan border. Its goal is to rule Uganda on the basis of the 10 biblical commandments.

The Ugandan government has often charged that the LRA, like the WNBF, uses bases in Sudan as a springboard for raids into Uganda. The Sudanese authorities counter that Uganda is supporting the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which temporarily drove the Ugandan insurgents from refugee camps in southern Sudan in the 1980s.

It is the thousands of Sudanese who have fled the war raging in the south of their country for 13 years now who will suffer most from the insecurity in north-western Uganda.

The attacks there have affected not only the activities of the ICRC and the JRS but also the operations of OXFAM, which has been the main aid agency working in the West Nile region, catering for more than 60,000 Sudanese refugees there.

In April, WNBF rebels commandeered seven vehicles belonging to OXFAM and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in addition to looting food and household items from both agencies.

Then, in mid-June, nine policemen guarding a Sudanese refugee camp at Ikafe, near Arua, were overpowered by the rebels, who then plundered the camp, OXFAM representative in Uganda, Tony Burton, told the state-run ‘New Vision’ newspaper in Kampala recently.

This led the British NGO to withdraw its staff from the Ikafe camp.

There is little to indicate that the insecurity in north- western Uganda will end soon, even though Uganda’s president has offered the WNBF amnesty. Museveni said recently that, if the WNBF rebels abandon their war, he would welcome them because, unlike the LRA, they have not committed atrocities against civilians.

A Sudanese refugee here, who refused to be named, told IPS he expected the WNBF to continue its attacks on refugees camps in Uganda.

“I think they want to punish the SPLA for attacking Ugandan refugee camps in the 1980s,” he said. “Many of the WNBF soldiers were in the refugee camps in the Sudan and they have not forgiven the SPLA for chasing them from the Sudan.”