'GuluWalks' spotlight civil war in Uganda

CHAPEL HILL -- The 21-year-old civil war that is ravaging Uganda has been dubbed "the world's worst neglected humanitarian crisis" by a United Nations official. But it's all too real to Okot Nyormoi, a biology professor at N.C. Central University.

The 65-year-old native of Uganda has a brother who has been forced by the government to live in a squalid "protective village" for years. A second brother escaped. "They're really nothing more than concentration camps," Nyormoi said.

The husband of one of Nyormoi's cousins was killed when the rebel Lord's Resistance Army attacked the camp where he lived. "I have some gruesome pictures," Nyormoi said. "I'm not sure you can stand to look at them."

Nyormoi was the featured speaker Sunday afternoon on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus before a four-mile trek designed to publicize the plight of displaced persons and children who have been forced to become soldiers in northern Uganda. It was one of nearly 100 "GuluWalks" scheduled around the world.

Among the 50 or so local participants was Rossana Funte, a computer programmer and mother of two young children, who lives in Chapel Hill.

"I can't fly out there and do something, but I don't want to sit back and be apathetic about the situation," she said.

Nyormoi's speech didn't address how the conflict has affected him and his family personally, but he discussed it in an interview beforehand. His talk addressed the suffering in his homeland at the macro level, including genocide.

The up to 1 million people currently living in camps in northern Uganda are "dying at the rate of thousands per week" because of unsanitary conditions and insufficient food and water, he said.

"Because of the intolerable conditions, many of them are committing suicide," he said. "We want you to focus on the disbanding of the camps."

Nyormoi also urged people to contact their congressmen and senators in Washington to protest a meeting scheduled for Tuesday at the White House between President Bush and Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda.

"He is a despot, a dictator," said Nyormoi. "He embezzles public funds."

If President Bush "wants to support democracy in the world, he should not be hobnobbing with dictators," he added.

The GuluWalk was named after the town of Gulu, Nyormoi's hometown, one of the urban centers that children have walked miles to reach every night. Their goal: to spend the night in the "relative safety" of urban areas to avoid being abducted and forced to become gun-toting soldiers.

"If they stayed in their villages, the guerrillas would kidnap them," Nyormoi said.

Those night commutes have subsided, for now, because the shooting has stopped while the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army conduct peace talks.

Such talks have ended in failure in the past, but Nyormoi is eternally optimistic.

"I believe in what goes up, must come down," he said. "It reminds me of things in England. They used to have a Thirty Years' War, they used to have a Hundred Years' War. And they came to an end. I think this will someday end."