Thousands starve in Uganda

Press, 30 July 1986, Page 51

Thousands starve in Uganda

Kampala Thousands of people are starving in Uganda’s populous West Nile region and relief workers have declared it a “disaster area,” said a United Nations refugee spokesman.

The spokesman for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.) said 30 people had died during the last few weeks and that the death toll could rise sharply.

The U.N.H.C.R. had made a special appeal for food.

Those suffering are Ugandan refugees who have returned in their thousands from Sudan where they fled the civil war that ravaged Uganda during the last year.

Officials estimate that more than 70,000 Ugandans have moved back since the middle of May. Their return was

triggered by attacks on refugee camps in Southern Sudan by gangs of unidentified armed men.

Seventeen people were killed in the raids which were blamed on troops loyal to the defeated Ugandan leader, Tito Okello, and rebels from the secessionist Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (S.P.L.A.).

Food shortages in Southern Sudan are also worrying international relief officials who began organising airlifts from Uganda’s Entebbe airport to the southern Sudanese town of Juba, cut off from the rest of the country by bandits and rebels. The United Nations Under-Secretary, Mr Abdulrahim Farah, in charge of co-ordinating U.N. assistance programmes, has visited Kampala and the West Nile region, bordering Sudan and Zaire, to assess aid needed for the return-

ing refugees.

The World Food Programme (W.F.P.) has announced it is providing $2,618 million in food aid for the refugees. Ugandan journalists who visited the West Nile region recently reported that refugees were complaining that food they were being given was often rotten and unfit for human consumption, but that there was no alternative. They said the worst hit areas were near the Sudanese border and Madi further south.

People were starving there and eating roots and any berries and fruit they could find, the journalists said. They reported 15 people had died from starvation in the Dufile district and 19 in Pajaklri and Pamoyi districts, four more than the official U.N.H.C.R. figure.