Refuge in Uganda?

This was a difficult week. On Tuesday, one of my team mates and I met with members of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) and learned of the challenges the LGBTQ community faces in Uganda, which are great and in addition to being subject to hate crimes, harassment and discrimination are also limited in their access to HIV/AIDS testing and counselling. Amnesty International has more information regarding the situation I'll refer to for background but here is a link to an urgent action from last year http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR590072006?open&of=ENG-UGA. You can also find more information from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission at www.iglhrc.org.

Wednesday was a travel day for our team, as we headed over 400 km south to Kabale, where after 12 hours on a bus (that's a story in and of itself) we spent a lovely night each with our own rooms and for me my first hot shower of the trip!!

A view of the mountainside in the south west of Uganda in Kabale district. Incredibly fertile land, which as you can see, is cultivated at every opportunity.

The view from one of the mountaintops on our way to the camp, of the second deepest lake in Africa, if I recall correctly. I can't remember the name of it.
In the background here are three inactive volcanos, which border Uganda. On the other side is Rwanda.

Thursday morning we headed west another 100 km west to Kisoro district, where we first visited the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reception centre in Nyakabande, less than 15 km from the border. The reception centre was home to approximately 12,000 Congolese who fled the area and around Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As we drove through the mountains to the camp, a UNHCR convoy of nine buses passed us and we learned from the camp director that approximately 1,000 refugees were on the buses being moved about 400 km into the interior to the official camp – a camp that has services available and was used for Rwandan refugees during and after the genocide and was recently mostly vacant as most Rwandans have returned home.

Not a great picture but it gives you the visual of the size of the camp (the white tents) from the mountain road we came down on.

At the camp, which is basically a staging area for registering new arrivals and then preparing to move them to the internal camp, we met with Medicins sans Frontiers (MSF - Doctors without Borders) staff, who also gave us a tour. We were told that there were currently an estimated 6,000 people in the camp, mostly women and children. The numbers are based on their registration system but they said many refuse to register, as they do not want to move to the camp where they believe they will die as they have heard stories to that effect. Without registering you are not provided a tent to sleep in and these refugees are thus inside the camp area but have an area in the open where they live (below piture).

We were told most refugees stay 4-6 weeks before either being moved to the larger camp or either returning to the DRC or going into the forest. They estimated between 4-6,000 refugees have never come even to the reception centre and instead live in the forests along the border.

While MSF provides safe drinking water and has a medical clinic on site, no food is provided to the inhabitants. As soon as we arrived children, many who haven’t eaten in days if not weeks, surrounded us asking for food. The women and children might go to surrounding homes and villages to beg for food and while the Ugandans living in this region, including the Parishes have provided some assistance, they do not have the means to feed them. The policy of not providing food is that of UNHCR and the Ugandan government, as they do not want these refugees to stay in the centre, they want to move them. As the camp is so near to the border the fear is that the fighting could cross over into Uganda and that the security could be compromised. The refugees however, want to be close to the border so that they can return home sooner.

Some of the children in the camp - these would likely have been here less than 2 months.

I felt so utterly helpless as we went through the camp, as there is no way to help. I only hope that somehow the children survive (many children have already died here and in the interior camp) long enough to be able to return or for some assistance to reach them.

From the camp, we then drove to Bunagana, the small town at the border of DRC, where the streets are filled with refugees. They live on the street and in the ‘no man’s land’ between the borders. Again, we were surrounded by begging - a father telling us about his wife and 7 children who have been living at the border for a month and have no food. At that moment I was grateful for my limited French. What can I possibly say? A local priest told us about a donation of food he’d received but the food was so minimal that if he’d tried to distribute it he would likely have been accused of keeping the rest for himself, so the bags of food (maybe 8 bags) remain at his church, not eaten by anyone. His parish has opened the primary schools for refugees to find shelter, which was particularly helpful in the recent rainy season.

This is the border crossing at Bunagana - taken from the DRC side - the log across the road is the official border marker, but it is fluid to say the least.

Two members of our team have now traveled on to Kigali in Rwanda and will be continuing on into DRC to learn more about the conflict. What we know from recent news articles is that the rebel leader, Laurent Nkunda – who is responsible for this most recent displacement – has an estimated 4-8,000 troops. The DRC government has sent 200,000 soldiers to Goma to disarm the rebels and I fear the crossfire in the process, which is what people are fleeing.

This is just a glimpse of two of the most vulnerable populations in Uganda today.