The UN Security Council condemned the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda for committing "appalling atrocities" and a top UN official accused the rebel group of turning thousands of children into "killing machines."
The council, in its first statement on the tragedy, demanded Wednesday that the Lord's Resistance Army "cease immediately all acts of violence against civilians."
The group rose from the remnants of a revolt by soldiers from the dominant Acholi tribe in northern Uganda after President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, seized power in 1986. Kidnapping has been the rebels' main recruitment method during the 17-year-old conflict, with an estimated 20,000 children being taken.
Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland accused the international community, the Ugandan government and people in the region of doing far too little for the 1.5 million people caught up in what he called "one of the world's worst humanitarian emergencies of our time."
In the last 18 months, he said, 10,000 children have been kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army and "been terrorized into becoming killing machines, terrorized into attacking their own villages, killing their own relatives."
Then, the rebels tell the children, "You now have nowhere to go and no one to return to, now you are with us and we are the Lord's Resistance Army," he said.
"This is a war fought by children on children," Egeland said, explaining that 80 percent of the rebel group's soldiers are minors, according to one estimate, and most victims are children.
In addition, Egeland said, the number of displaced people in northern and eastern Uganda where the rebel group operates has tripled from 550,000 in January 2002 to more than 1.5 million today.
The fighting is believed to have killed and mutilated tens of thousands of people.
As a result of the Lord's Resistance Army's abduction policy, Egeland said, "there is now a phenomena called the night commuter" in northern and eastern Uganda.
"These are 40,000 children and mothers of small children commuting every night -- walking every night to the nearest town, sleeping outside hospitals or on the floors of community centers, or outside the town halls, because they there feel a sense of security," he said. "Every morning, at 6am, they trek back one or two hours to the villages."
Egeland said the international community has tried to respond to the humanitarian crisis, and the UN World Food Program was providing basic food supplies to the 1.5 million people displaced by the fighting.
But the UN has received only 10 percent of the US$127 million it appealed for to help Ugandans caught up in the crisis.
Egeland spoke to reporters after briefing the Security Council for the first time on the humanitarian situation sparked by the Lord's Resistance Army.
The council issued a statement afterwards expressing concern about the large-scale displacement of civilians, the abduction of children and their forced recruitment as soldiers and sex slaves.
Council members stressed that such crimes "should not go unpunished."
The council also stressed "the importance of exploring all peaceful avenues to resolve the conflict."
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