When Iron Fist instead escalated the war, the government replied by emptying huge swathes of the northern Uganda districts of Gulu, Pader, Kitgum, Lira, Soroti and Apac of people. The operation has boomeranged on the children.
Agriculture not only provided nourishment, but was for most, the only source of family income. Now, food is so scarce it has become a currency; a weapon of war; an inducement for children to go to school, even work is paid for in pulses and cereals."Food is absolutely everything," Ken Davies the WFP country director in Uganda says. "It is a desperate situation. What we are doing there is saving lives."
At 3 PM in the compound of the Christian Counseling Fellowship Centre at Pader district headquarters, two black saucepans sit on top of badly smoking fires, which when the wind turns, blow into the shed where the teenage mothers have escaped from the sun with their children.
The silence of the 20 young adults belies the depth of trauma behind them: All the mothers without exception got pregnant from rape. Safe for a while from bullets and machetes, they sit watching their children withering away.
Inside the concentrated camps, malnutrition quickly graduates into disease as children lose the strength to fight off infectious diseases.
WFP alone stands between them and mass starvation. The food is delivered in convoys that stretch more than a kilometer the organisation done on a military scale:
From Lira to Pajule, the convoy wafts along the dusty Kitgum road in a grim drive through a region that has been pushed to the point of desperation and beyond; past rusted remains of vehicles burnt at ambushes; for hours it meets only a handful of people; solitary figures crossing the road ahead are suspicious. For that the convoys are well-prepared. The trucks used are the toughest. The blunt-faced 8-wheel-drive M.A.N SX German military trucks used by the WFP to transport food are built to perform like tanks and should need arise, can cut through 2 meter-deep rivers, ram through trees and withstand 8 kilogram mine blasts. Here, they hammer the dirt road apart, sending up dust clouds that can be seen for kilometers away.When we enter Pajule, some three hours later, it is immediately clear why the convoys are needed. The children drawn to the roadside are clad in unwashed clothing held by strips of thread. Their stomachs are distended, the hair turning a wispy gold, the pasty eyes a magnet for flies. Inside the camp, the realities are jolting: The digging of graves goes on all the time. Those still alive, live amidst the smell of human waste mixed to black sludge with uncollected rubbish. Immediately, you notice that this is a glass prison, for beyond the huts, the world is cleaner, greener, airier place you are not allowed to go to.
Alice Acam talks with intense urgency. She needs more food, more money and transportation and communication and expertise than she will get. As program coordinator of the Christian Counseling Centre, her work is to rehabilitate the children who have escaped from the fighting. But it is often futile. "Hunger is killing children," she says.
She says that 10 to 14 year-olds ought to eat at least 20 kilograms of meat, poultry and fish a year, no less than 10 kilograms of vegetables and fruits with a daily intake of 400 grams of carbohydrates.
A feature you see of the camps is naked children apathetically stubbing forefingers into bowls of corn soy blended porridge. The typical meal is maize meal and beans, millet and sorghum, millet, sweet potatoes and cassava or beans and vegetables seasoned in groundnut paste.
Pader is one of the poorest districts in Uganda. Virtually no economic activity takes place. The entire human population lives in camps. Whatever agriculture there is, is restricted to strips of land hugging the roads and are only a handful of meters long. The cattle were stolen at gun point in the late 1980s, when the war started. Now, during an entire year, a child is lucky to get even 3 kilograms of meat.
Right in the heartland of Acholi, the district has seen the worst of the fighting. Its children have been forcibly drafted into both sides of the fighting. Education is frequently interrupted. It is a wasteland; the finely crafted St Josephine Bakhita church on the road to Pader town is disappearing under grass and tree. The road itself is bare earth pressed in by bush. When the town comes, it is a pile of bricks in a dust storm. People's faces are drawn in and blank - the harried looks of those who don't know what the soldiers are going to do to them.
15-year old Jennifer Akello now at Acam's centre, went to harvest sorghum in December 2003 in Pagwere when she was abducted and forced to carry loads to Ogom, a few days walk from the Sudan border. In the bush, her role was food-gathering, for the rebel ranks are now transformed to forage the hundreds of square kilometers for food tubes of cassava, ears of millet, sorghum, potatoes, edible and inedible leaves anything to stay standing.
The first time she was sent to look for food, Akello dug at the ground with her nails to get at shrunken cassava tubes. The next time they sent her without escort, she escaped. Now 15, she is just in primary five, six years behind her compatriots in southern and western Uganda.
What happens in the bush if you return without food?
"Oii," she lets out a dry, humorless laugh. "If you find food once you are lucky. The next time you might not find it. Two children who came back without food were cut up with a panga."
When they chance upon a rice field, the rebels jerk up the rice-ears. They boil that so the husks flake off and they chew the half cooked rice. When they stop to cook meat, chicken or edible rats, the boiling meat is tied with a rope to the waist of a captive so that when firing starts and they run, the food is not lost.
The commanders, so called "tutors", eat first. The rank-and-file waits. Something might be left. Most often, nothing is left. In the bush, life tends to be one meal a week and crazed by hunger, the rank-and-file stuff grass and leaves into their mouths. This can kill.
The escaped children who turn up at the counseling centre are mostly severely malnourished.
"They complain of stomach aches, headaches," says Acam. "They all have dysentery. Most of them pass blood and water in their stools with no solid waste."
Their faces are pimply, the hair matted, eyes bloodshot and infected. The babies, born to malnourished mothers lose their eye-sights. As I talk to 22-year old Pasca Atimayo, who is seated in the compound of Pajule Catholic Mission, amidst the portions of maize and beans which she has just received from WFP, she pauses in mid-sentence. But it is not to recollect something. She is out of breath, not strong enough to support so much speech.
The food she has been given is meant for a month, but she says it won't last that long. She looks after 5 orphaned children and has 2 of her own. Her grandparents share her hut as well.
35-year old David Kidega has six children. He has to supplement the food given him by the WFP earning some Ush 500 on the days there is an odd-job to do. Kidega and Atimayo can't afford medical treatment. Someone told them that when children have a fever, you dig out the root of papaws and boil; boil eucalyptus leaves when they have a cough. The group that gathers around Kidega for the interview is wracked by cough, wheezing breaths for the children, the stained eyes of adults, bony chests that stick out of tattered cloth.
Kaijuka describes malnutrition as a gradual process that builds up from mild, moderate to severe depending on the degree of food deprivation or disease severity.
Doreen Angom's 9-month son, Cosmos Opio whom she escaped from the LRA pregnant with, and who cannot get his mother's milk nor have proper baby food, is facing severe malnutrition. Constantly crying, he is too weak to eat and has to be force-fed.
Even with its budget always stretched, the WFP says it meets only 74 per cent of the people's food needs. According to Davies, the people in the camps are capable of meeting 26 per cent of their calorie needs.
Kaijuka says that the internationally agreed upon energy intake in emergency situations is 2100 kilo calories per day, although this may change depending on climatic regions. However, the WFP uses this to calculate the food basket to the camps. But Davies says "Too many children are still malnourished."
The food given by the WFP is also for most interns, a potential commodity of trade.
Without clean water and a good sanitary environment, Kaijuka adds, the effects of hunger are worsened. "What is happening in northern Uganda is that a lot of children have not been eating properly over a long period of time. The nutrition problem is exacerbated by poor living conditions due to congestion and poor hygiene and health care practices."
The Irish charity organisation the GOAL Project reported that private livestock ownership is dried up. The hundreds of thousands of animals once found here are down to double and single-digit figures. At the beginning of 2003, GOAL counted 109 chickens in Kalongo (a few kilometers from Pajule); 80 goats, 14 cattle, 7 milking cows and 1 duck. A year later, there were 15 chickens, 10 goats, 4 heads of cattle, 0 milking cows and 1 duck.
Four months previous to the June 2003 debacle, 60 per cent of the population reported relying on sale of their food crops as a source of income, a figure which fell drastically to 8.7 per cent towards the end of 2003. Harvest and sale of firewood was a fall-back for most, but not for those trapped in camps like Pajule.
In the end, the camp interns are forced to sell the food they get from the WFP to buy a tin-full of charcoal. Some of the maize itself will be brewed into alcohol as mothers look for money to purchase soap and medicine.
Less, then, of the 2100 kilo-calories gets eaten.
Kaijuka says that Uganda has acute malnutrition rates of 5 per cent and below which are tolerable. In the north, the figures shoot to as high as 18 per cent. But 31.6 per cent has been recorded in Anaka; a lower one of 4.7 per cent, in Kalongo.
In Pajule trading centre, milk and meat are scarce. The half liter Ultra Heated Treated Milk from Kampala milk plants cost me Ush1, 500 (85 US cents) and had gone sour when I bought it. A tray of eggs is Ush6, 000 ($3.4); putting both at five and two times the national average respectively.
In time, the children dry up and cease moving and hence emergency medical intervention is nutritional. Medicine Sans Frontier has entire wards for emergency feeding. In Pajule, the WFP supports the Pajule Therapeutic Feeding Centre. There, 43-year old Sylvia Alwoc sits nursing her 1-year old granddaughter and orphan, Winnie Akano. Winnie is incredibly emaciated, her upper arms no larger than her grandmother's thumb; her skin of a person at least twenty years her grandmother's senior.
The children carry a complexity of afflictions; Kwashiakor, anemia, marasmas and oedema illnesses that come from not eating well. In that state, they are easy prey to malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, diarrhea, measles and acute respiratory illness. 80 per cent lack iron.
The health status started worsening with the creation of camps in the mid 1990s. Infant mortality rates increased from 81 to 88 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1995 and 2000. Children aged 3 to 11 months, are weaned on practically nothing and it is they that are the most malnourished.
Surveys in Gulu and Kitgum show that 12.2 per cent of children suffered from oedema, the swelling of the body of children suffering from Kwashiakor.
Besides the unnaturally swollen children, are the unnaturally emaciated; the Median Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC), is a measurement which gauges which malnourished children are at risk of death. With an upper arm measuring 110 millimeters and below, the child is hours from probable death:
"The children are simply dying," says Dr. Jens Wenkel, volunteer physician for the MSF supplementary feeding centre in Lira. "That is all."
The death figures vary, but all are beyond what the World Health Organisation (WHO) describes as a crisis, which is one death a day out of every 10,000 people. In March 2004, GOAL recorded 2.1/10,000 in Pader. 2/10,000 deaths are considered by the WHO as an "out of control" emergency. And yet worse has been recorded: The US organisation, Action Against Hunger (AAH) recorded death figures of 5.67/10,000 in 21 camps in Gulu in May 2003.
But the worst perhaps, is a figure of 10.5/10,000 by MSF reported in November 2004 in one of the camps in Lira district.
And so the worst image that sticks of northern Uganda is the tent wards. There, the children are skeletal ruins on whom you see the skulls clearly outlined; the sockets around their eyes; the jutting cheek bones over the collapsed cheeks; below that, the neck birdlike - sticking from the sinking pit of the collar bones. Lower, you can count their ribs. Lower still, you see the pelvic bones awkwardly pushing at the wasted skin. To see how knees ball out is to cease thinking of them as humans:
In the beds, the children are unmoving bundles sinking into the sheets; the heads dramatically larger than the torsos; tubes feed into the noses and skins. They don't move their unnaturally white eyes and they are too weak to cry. You are forced to whip your face away.
"When you go to dig a grave, you find a body already in the ground," Kidega says. "You stop digging and burry a dead body on top of a dead body. People die everyday and you learn not to cry."
Kidega lived in a place called Ora-Otwilo, six kilometers away from the camp. Today he says that his house is constantly suffering from malaria, stomach aches and dysentery. He says attempting to go out to look for food is risky because "when you are caught by the army, they cane you up to 100 strokes; make you sleep in the cold till morning. We are living like prisoners here, to die off one by one. We can work for ourselves and feed our children if they allow us to go home."
The WFP cannot give the interns everything they need. The organisation spends a lot of its money, not on food, but on transporting it. It costs $489 to ferry every metric ton of food aid. Between January and September 2004 alone, it brought 19,000 metric tons to Pader, which came to $10 million.
The monthly average food distribution of food is 12,200 metric tons; 146,319 metric tons to the camps for the whole of 2004. 2004 was the most difficult year given the scale of displacement; it was the year also when donor support was unprecedented contributing, with the lead of the USA and the UK, US$ 92 million.
90 per cent of the interns are unable to provide enough for themselves.
The WFP is asking for 452,508 metric tons of food for the next three years, in a program that foresees the war coming to an end and people resettled back home. It is slated to cost $263 million. Of this, food alone will cost $118 million.
The war costs the Acholi region alone $100 million a year in lost productivity. The land available to the interns lies in a radius of 2km around each camp. The WFP estimates that what is available to each family is only 0.2 ha - of land borrowed or rented. The maximum grain production, it is estimated is only enough to fulfill 3 months need for a family of seven.
Northern leaders say that the southern dominated government does not care how much the children of the region seen as a political rival territory suffer.
"The children in the northern part of Uganda you cannot compare to the rest of the country," says Soroti Women's MP Alice Alasu. "The understanding of a 16-year old in the camps compares to a 6-year old elsewhere. We have asked government to pay fees, to pay for food, for security. But even the little that is given by donors is cut down or not given at all. There is need to understand that this is a country for everyone."
The MPs from the Acholi sub-region make the charge that behind encampment is a sinister plot to commandeer land from the population. MP Nobert Mao was part of a program by Divinity Union, drawn by Lt Gen Salim Saleh to combine food production and security within the camp confines. But he grew suspicious. "If it was meant to feed the people, why did he insist on getting land titles first? We hear now about commercial farmers from Zimbabwe coming to inspect the land. People close to government are going to the camps saying the camps will be turned into urban areas.
"There is fear amongst the people about their land but over the years, people have been dying and there are places where there is no adult left. Since 1996 when the displacement started even the landscape has changed."
The UPDF makes the charge that even within the camp itself, there are interns who still smuggle the little food given by the WFP to the LRA. The interns deny this and accuse the army of sometimes dressing up as rebels and to try and find out who gives food to the LRA. (This particular story was confirmed by an army office in Pajule).
Davies says that in the long term, the people should start to produce their own food. He manages the situation by making sure that he has two-months' stockpile at a time, and is constantly lobbying for support.
The social break down from this food crisis has been extensive.
"There is a great deal of psychological damage," Davies says. "There is breakdown of family with men feeling unable to provide for their family; there is alcoholism; some men have deserted their families people leaving to go to Kampala, to Masindi looking for casual labour. We haven't always had a problem on this scale. I have brought people to the north from Rome who have traveled elsewhere and I have heard them say this is the worst human suffering they have ever seen.
"It is a uniquely savage conflict."Ends
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