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"WORLD
MUST INTERVENE IN UGANDA"
LLOYD
AXWORTHY
The Globe and Mail, July 15, 2003
Former
Canadian foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy said Tuesday that
suffering in northern Uganda's civil war has reached the point that
it cannot be solved locally and requires urgent international intervention.
Mr. Axworthy — who is now director of the Liu Institute for Global
Issues at the University of British Columbia — said he is encouraged
by the "enormous heroism" he has seen displayed by many
Ugandans, but also that the situation is now so dire that "they
no longer know what to do."
"[Fighting] has accelerated in the last several months to a point
where the degree of suffering and tragedy and violation has now so
totally demoralized the population and has so frustrated any attempts
at peace negotiation that there is a cry for help from the people
of that area," he told reporters in Ottawa.
The call for humanitarian intervention comes a day after Prime Minister
Jean Chrétien pitched a summit of 14 centre-left national leaders
his plan for broad guidelines to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Mr. Chrétien proposed the use of international bodies other
than the United Nations, if the UN were unable to act. The other leaders,
however, were reluctant to agree to such a broader approach, insisting
in the final communiqué that the UN is the only body with the
legitimacy to authorize a humanitarian intervention.
Speaking in Ottawa to mark the release of a report from the Liu Institute,
Mr. Axworthy called on international community to intervene quickly
in Uganda's civil war, which pits the government of Yoweri Museveni
against a ragtag bunch of fighters known as the Lord's Resistance
Army (LRA) and led by a shadowy mystic.
"It is not just the LRA, although they are the main perpetrators,"
he said. "They have been the major rebel group, working out of
southern Sudan for the past years. But, in March of 2002, the Ugandan
government undertook a military operation as part of a counterterrorist
campaign called 'Iron Fist.' The result was counterproductive, it
simply forced the LRA back into the country, where they started retaliation."
In the countryside, families and their children are terrified of the
LRA, which has swelled its ranks by abducting teens and pre-teens
for training as guerrillas. Several examples have been widely publicized
— as when a school dormitory was raided and scores of teenage
girls taken away — but the practice has mostly been ignored by
the world. The war is, as Mr. Axworthy described it, "invisible
to many people."
Hundreds of children are believed to be taken from their homes every
week and an estimated 20,000 sleep rough every night, afraid to stay
home for fear of being press-ganged. "It is becoming, really,
an inferno, particularly for the children," Mr. Axworthy said.
The violence has also spread to include regular attacks on food convoys,
aid workers and churches. Close to one million people now live in
Displaced Persons camps, where social conventions have collapsed and
rape, assault, kidnapping and violation are common, Mr. Axworthy said.
Sexually transmitted diseases and HIV are on the rise in the camps.
"When we had the Winnipeg conference on child protection in the
fall of 2000, certain commitments were made — by our government
and by other governments — to provide protection for children,"
he added. "We're here to call [for] those commitments to be lived
up to. This really is a prime example of promises made and now we
need to have those promises kept."
Lloyd Axworthy is the Director and CEO of the Centre for the Study
of Global Issues at the University of British Columbia; and Minister
of Foreign Affairs, Canada (1996 - 2000).
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