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A Cry For Help From Young Ugandans Shattered By Civil War

KAMPALA (dpa) – Like Rose Achiro, thousands of young people in northern Uganda are having to stand by and see their hopes for the future shattered by the effects of war.

“We, the young people, are under siege. We are kept in camps and the girls suffer most. They are forced into early marriages. Many girls have AIDS because of defilement and rapes,” Achiro, 17, said at the launch of a research report focusing on war-affected adolescents in the region.

The bloody guerrilla war in the northern half of Uganda has left behind a trail of destruction. Hundreds of people have been displaced from their homes, an unknown number have been killed, maimed, traumatised and abducted by Sudanese-backed rebels.

Hundreds of thousands of survivors have been herded into “protected villages” or camps for Internally Displaced Peoples where life is so unbearable that they are begging the government to send them home.

Many of the adolescents among them are so shattered physically and psychologically and in such dire need of support that international charity workers fear they will be part of a lost generation if emergency intervention does not arrive in time.

A New York-based Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children organised a research project carried out last summer in northern Uganda under which 54 youths carried out interviews with 2,000 youths affected by the war in displaced people’s camps which hold more than 600,000 people.

The survey revealed that many of the youths are orphaned, having to support whole households or are playing truant for fear of rebel abductions. People released after being abducted by rebels are still traumatised while many girls have been raped or otherwise sexually abused. Of these, many marry early and are exposed to the virus that causes the deadly immune disease AIDS.

The civil war has been raging between government forces and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels who have been killing civilians and abducting youths whom they force to fight and commit atrocities.

“Adolescents who manage to survive and escape abduction carry enormous scars, seen or unseen. Many are tormented by the acts of violence they were forced to commit. They return to communities that fear them and are themselves in turmoil, ill-equipped to support their recovery or protect them from re-abduction,” said the 90-page report launched in the capital Kampala.

Northern Uganda is also home to thousands of Sudanese refugees flushed out of their homes by the 18 year-war in their country waged by the rebel Sudan Peoples Liberation Army SPLA.

Sudan accuses Uganda of backing the SPLA and the Sudanese adolescents in the refugee camps were included in the survey, narrating problems similar to those of their Ugandan counterparts.

Like the LRA, “the SPLA abducts young people from inside Sudan and Uganda – they testify to receiving military training at SPLA camps in northern Uganda run by the Ugandan military,” said the report titled “Against All Odds: Surviving the War on Adolescents”.

“We lack education and after primary school we do not know where to go next. We are forced to drop out of school because we lack sponsorship,” said Amute Francis, a 17-year-old Sudanese refugee at AcholPii refugee camp which is home to 18,000 people.

Recommendations by the adolescents themselves were detailed in the report and these included calling upon the two governments of Uganda and Sudan to end their support for rebel armies and an take immediate action to address their needs, including education and health.

“The LRA and SPLA should negotiate with the governments of Uganda and Sudan and disarm and release all captive children and child soldiers,” they said.

Senior project coordinator Jane Lowicki said that the research on adolescents affected by the war in Uganda was the second dossier to be compiled after the first was carried out in Kosovo. A third survey will be carried out in Sierra Leone in West Africa and another in a country in Asia.

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