Helen Mirren: Chance to end Uganda's 20-year nightmare

Helen Mirren

As the world struggles to bring peace to Lebanon, away from the headlines another conflict is balanced on a knife-edge between peace and war.

Northern Uganda may get less media coverage than the Middle East but the suffering there is no less acute. Millions have been driven from their homes into camps and thousands killed.

Since the war began, more than 25,000 children have been kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and forced to fight.

For the last month, the LRA and the Ugandan Government have been in talks to end the 20-year war.

In December 2004, I visited northern Uganda with Oxfam, and saw thousands of children walking into town centres to sleep rough on the floors of schools and hospitals. Towns are the safest places as the LRA rarely attack them.

At that time, up to 40,000 children were making this journey every night. Now, the figure is nearer 10,000. In the last few months, LRA attacks have decreased allowing people to start to piece together their lives.

For the last 10 years, more than 90 per cent of northern Uganda's population has lived in camps, over-crowded, unsanitary places where the toll on children has been heavy.

This year, it was estimated that 41 per cent of all deaths in the camps were of children under five, that almost 50 per cent of children were stunted due to malnutrition and that across northern Uganda 250,000 children had no schooling.

The camps are surrounded by miles upon miles of rolling, fertile countryside, earning this region the reputation of "the breadbasket of Uganda" before the war.

Now the people have been able to start farming again and the first harvest in many years is being brought in. It is not a bumper crop; it is still too dangerous to cultivate many fields. But it is a start.

People are telling Oxfam that they are able to revisit their homes, though they won't start rebuilding until they know peace has really come. People are busy drying their crops and tending their animals.

The LRA often targeted schools to abduct children. Now parents can send their children to study without worry. And with the number of abductions down, so are the numbers in reception centres for children who have escaped from LRA.

I went to one of those centres and met young John, who would sit under a mango tree playing an instrument, mesmerised by its melancholic sound.

It seemed that only music could obliterate memories of the atrocities he had committed.

If the peace talks succeed, the abduction of children like John should become a thing of the past.

But all could be lost if the talks break down and fighting restarts.

* British actor Dame Helen Mirren is an ambassador for Oxfam on conflict, and has travelled to Uganda and South Africa and represented Oxfam at the United Nations.