Museveni hits out at UN over Darfur comparison
KAMPALA, Oct 9 (Reuters) – President Yoweri Museveni hit out on Saturday at the United Nations’ top humanitarian official for suggesting the suffering caused by war in northern Uganda was at least as bad as that in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur.
U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland urged the international community on Thursday to focus on northern Uganda, where some 1.6 million people have fled their homes to escape brutal rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
“That gentleman is always writing false reports about Uganda,” Museveni told a crowd of several thousand gathered to celebrate the east African country’s 42nd independence day.
“In what way is it like Darfur? True, people are in camps because of attacks by the terrorists. But it seems some people don’t want us to defeat the terrorists. I wonder at the motives of these people who go around claiming to care about Africa, but actually have other interests.”
Remote districts of northern Uganda have been plagued by an 18-year-old insurgency waged by the LRA, which is reviled for kidnapping tens of thousands of children and forcing them to serve the group as fighters, porters and sex slaves.
But Ugandan officials have often said the war is close to ending and have recently sounded unusually confident following a string of punishing attacks on LRA groups.
Egeland said as many as two million people there were living in sub-human conditions as a result of the conflict.
“If they go out (of camps for the displaced) they are killed as much, or raped as much or worse, as in Darfur, by the Lord’s Resistance Army and others,” he told reporters.
“The attention that I was very happy to see on Darfur we should be able to raise equally with northern Uganda,” he said.
Civilians in the north say some Ugandan army troops attack and rob inhabitants of displaced camps. The army denies it.
The U.N. calls the crisis in Sudan’s western Darfur region the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, estimating that 1.5 million people have been displaced by conflict since 2003.
Museveni said he had appealed to the world body in 1994 to take action against neighbouring Sudan, which has long been accused of backing the LRA and its elusive leader Joseph Kony.
“They refused to do anything, and we handled Sudan alone until Sudan abandoned supporting those terrorists,” Museveni told the cheering crowd. “Now that the problem is finishing, Mr Egeland comes up and says these things. No, no, no, no.”
The celebrations at an airfield in the capital Kampala were also attended by South African President Thabo Mbeki and Nigerian Vice President Al-Hajji Atiku Abubakar, who both congratulated Uganda on 42 years of independence from Britain.