February 22, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
For more than a decade, aid workers have been providing food and medical care to hundreds of thousands of people crammed into Uganda’s displacement camps. But are the workers actually prolonging the conflict that has caused so much suffering?, asks Emma Batha on the Reuters Alertnet blog.
The journalist Matthew Green writes in a new book, Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted, that many people were forced into the camps by the Ugandan government, eager to close in on the rebel leader Joseph Kony by cutting him off from supporters.
Mr. Green says that the World Food Program was sucked into this strategy by providing aid to the camps.
“The government said at the time it would be a few months,” he says, according to Ms. Batha. “Ten years later the camps were still there and they caused arguably more suffering than the rebels. The amount of disease, the squalor and social deprivation people suffered was appalling.”
Mr. Green doesn’t blame the World Food Program, but he does say that relief organizations “sometimes look away from the cause of the suffering. They try to treat the suffering but by doing that they actually become part of the system that creates the suffering.”
What do you think? Have humanitarian organizations unwittingly prolonged the crisis in Uganda? Is this a dilemma that has played out in other countries?
