11.05.2005
FEATURE: African Inter-Faith Initiative Promotes Landmine Survivors’ Exchange Program
Call for Concerted Effort in Reducing Risks, Enhancing Rehabilitation for Mine VictimsKAMPALA, Uganda/GENEVA, 11 May 2005 (LWI) - “When I woke up the next day, I was disabled.” That is how Margaret Arach Orech, an active member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) summarized her encounter with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency in northern Uganda in 1998.
She had had been caught up in an ambush when leaving Kitgum town. At first, she mistook the explosion for a tire burst. “But I did not realize that I had lost a leg,” Orech, currently co-chairperson of the ICBL Working Group on Victim Assistance (WGVA) told participants in a landmine survivors exchange program in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, March 29-April 2.
“I had bled for nine hours before we reached the hospital,” Orech said, repeating a story she has narrated in several forums. Sharing this experience, telling of the trauma, pain and suffering that survivors undergo has helped in her own and others’ healing process.
Participants in the program were drawn from a spectrum of non-governmental organizations and civil society movements that support a total ban on landmines, estimated somewhere between 60-85 million in the ground in over 60 countries worldwide.
Machok Majong, responsible for rehabilitation of disabled persons at Operation Save Innocent Lives (OSIL) in Southern Sudan was injured during fighting between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and government soldiers. He described his involvement in OSIL thus: “We have been telling them that disability is not inability. They are still useful in the community.”
Majong said there were many disabled persons in Southern Sudan, who have fallen victim to the numerous undiscovered fields of the so-called unexploded ordinances (UXOs). The UXO victims, he said, are now roaming helplessly around towns mentally frustrated and traumatized, with no care or assistance at all.
“The [Sudanese] government does not give them any support. The SPLM/A cannot afford any assistance,” he said, adding that 90 percent of any available help comes from local communities.
“Or they can go to the refugees camps where the international community may offer assistance,” said Majong, who was rescued by a good Samaritan and taken to a hospital in Lokichoggio, northwestern Kenya where he had his arm amputated.
The Kampala landmine survivors exchange visit was organized by the Inter-Faith Action for Peace in Africa (IFAPA), an initiative of the Geneva-based Lutheran World Federation, and attended by delegates from Ethiopia, Kenya, Southern Sudan and Uganda. Since its establishment in October 2002, IFAPA continues to strategically engage leaders of faith communities in initiatives that prevent conflict, encourage reconciliation and nurture peace in different parts of Africa. The landmine survivors program is considered a major contribution to long-term peace building processes.
Mereso Agina, coordinator of the Kenya Coalition Against Landmines said traditional donors were shunning funding victim assistance programs on the assumption that these were domestic initiatives which did not fall within their scope. Such support also tended to be comparatively less for Africa compared to other regions. She noted that Afghanistan for example, received three times the combined assistance toward Angola and Mozambique in 2004.
Bekele Gonfa, Landmine Survivors Network in Ethiopia, told the meeting “there is no question, persons with disabilities were entitled to the full range of human rights guaranteed to all people under the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
But he argued that this instrument did not adequately address disabilities’ specific social, political, economic and cultural circumstances, although its provisions held tremendous potential to equipping the estimated 300,000-400,000 landmine survivors to claim their human rights. The number of landmine casualties, according to the ICBL’s Landmine Monitor Report 2004 increased by 15,000 or 20,000 each year, with an estimated 500 innocent civilians killed or wounded each week.
Landmines are dreaded for their ability to lay dormant underground for decades until they are activated. In situations of conflict, warring groups have been planting them to force civilians abandon their land. Those who survive the initial blast almost always suffer horrific injuries and limb amputations, and are often disabled for life.
Addressing the IFAPA exchange program, Uganda’s Minister of State for Disaster Preparedness and Refugees, Christine Aporu Amongin, described the global landmine crisis as the most pervasive problem facing the world.
“Civil conflicts and wars have increased the number of landmines in [Africa], both in stocks and in the fields,” she said in her official opening address.
Her government has been engaged in a nearly two-decade struggle against the LRA rebels in the northern districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader, where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, maimed, injured and displaced by insurgency activities including landmines.
“As a government, we must work together with religious groups, NGOs and community-based groups in reducing mine risks and rehabilitation of those disabled by landmines,” she told the gathering.
If the obstacle to saving a victim’s life is not the long distance to the nearest health facility, it is lack resources at the health centers. For example, in Kassala, Southern Sudan, 84 percent of reported landmine or UXO casualties had to be transported at least 50 kilometers to the nearest health facility. In Ethiopia, only seven percent of the survivors identified between 2001 and 2003 were reported to have received rehabilitation assistance.
Moreover, most heavily mined countries are also the most underdeveloped, lacking requisite facilities and basic infrastructure such as roads, effective telecommunications network and health facilities.
In her presentation, Agina charged that the mine action networks had to argue a strong case for respective states and donors to elevate mine victim assistance to the highest possible priority in their resource allocation planning.
Sheikh Hamid Byamugenzi, Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, spoke on the role of faith communities in lobbying and advocating for the rights of people with disability. He said such involvement included an inter-faith perspective that sought to understand the issues ‘within’ a given religion itself. “Does that faith show compassion and respect for members of its congregations who are disabled?” he asked.
An intra-faith approach was equally important, according to Byamugenzi. It included cooperation with other faiths in working toward securing the rights of people with disability and addressing broader peace issues in the community.
In a number of resolutions, the anti-landmine campaigners stressed the religious leaders’ important role in working toward reconciliation and peace in communities torn by conflict. They also vowed to continue lobbying governments on their commitment to the Mine Ban Treaty on victim assistance. (1,091 words)
(By Nairobi (Kenya)-based LWI correspondent Fredrick Nzwili.)
*Sidebar: According to the Landmine Monitor Report 2004, funding for mine action has significantly increased since 1999, but assistance toward mine victims has declined. The report notes that due to efforts by the ICBL, signatory state parties, international and local NGOs in the field, the Mine Ban Treaty (calling for a total ban on the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines) has had an impact in raising awareness about the rights and needs of mine survivors, and has enabled the survivors themselves to advocate for services that would address their needs. While new programs have been implemented in many mine-affected countries, significant gaps remain in areas such as geographic coverage, affordability, and quality of available facilities.
The ICBL welcomed as “concrete and forward-looking” the declaration and action plan of the Nairobi Summit on a Mine-Free World in November/December 2004, which agreed on a wide range of measures to combat antipersonnel mines over the next five years. The anti-landmine body said it would sustain the pressure until the world has spurned antipersonnel mines and fully implemented the Mine Ban Treaty.
At least 22 mine-affected states are now taking, or have taken, steps to develop a plan of action to address the needs of mine survivors, or improve services for all persons with disabilities. Some donor states are also acknowledging their responsibilities to provide resources to assist mine-affected states in fulfilling their obligations.
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