The UN emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, said on Tuesday that relief crises in Africa were outpacing efforts to contain them and that the international community was failing to focus on the world's most pressing needs.
"The world's biggest drama is not found in Europe or the Middle East or North America -- the world's biggest challenges and dramas are found in Africa," Egeland said in an interview before delivering a closed-door briefing on the subject to the Security Council.
Saying it was essential that people decide that "human life is worth as much in northern Uganda as it is in northern Iraq, or in the Congo as in Kosovo," he declared, "The way it is now in Africa cannot continue because at the moment we are getting more new crises faster than we are solving old crises."
While the killing and displacement of tens of thousands of people in the Darfur region in Sudan had engaged the world, he said, a crisis of similar horror was being largely neglected in northern Uganda, and new outbreaks were erupting in countries like Chad and Togo.
He said that of the 14 fund appeals the UN had made for Africa, eight had attracted less than 20 percent of the requested amounts.
"In the Central African Republic, which is one of the poorest places on earth, we have 6 percent of what we asked for," he said. "And in Somalia, which has in some areas worse mortality rates than Darfur, we have 8 percent."
In Chad, more than 200,000 refugees from neighboring Darfur were overtaxing the resources of an already impoverished country. In Togo, unrest after a disputed election has generated "overnight" a refugee problem in Benin and Ghana, he said.
He said there were desperate food shortages in the south, in Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Mozambique, and in the north, in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
He warned of a "triple threat" menace to southern Africa -- a combination of HIV/AIDS, which he said had taken 250,000 lives in the region since January; drought brought on by catastrophically low rainfall, and weak government.
Egeland appealed in particular for urgent attention to northern Uganda, where several recent attempts to sign truces and open peace talks have faltered, and fighting has intensified in an 18-year-old conflict between rebel fighters and the government that has left 500,000 people dead and 2 million displaced.
The rebellion has been led since 1988 by a brutal force called the Lord's Resistance Army, which, in the name of forming a government based on the Ten Commandments, has slaughtered peasants and kidnapped children, turning them into what Egeland called mindless "killing machines."
Relief groups have estimated that 28,000 children have been abducted and forced to become soldiers and sex slaves in northern Uganda.
"It goes beyond anything I have ever seen in my years of humanitarian work in terms of trauma and suffering and incomprehensible cruelty, where people are mutilated, humiliated and destroyed as human beings," Egeland said.
In Uganda, he said, only 34 percent of the US$54 million sought in a UN appeal in November had been received.
"We are in danger of losing an historic opportunity to put an end to one of the worst set of atrocities in our generation," he said. "If we don't act, the window will close, and we will always regret what we did not do in 2005."
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