GOAL is demanding that the international community immediately commit an international peace force to the war-ravaged regions of northern Uganda and Sudan, so that aid workers can get aid to the vulnerable. The call comes hours after another aid worker was shot dead in an ambush in southern Sudan seemingly perpetrated by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). This brings to five the number of aid workers killed in separate ambushes in the region in the last two weeks alone.

The latest attack is part of a spate of vicious attacks on unarmed humanitarian workers, believed to be in response to an October 14 statement by the International Criminal Court that it had issued its first arrest warrants for the LRA leadership.

After the previous killings, relief groups said they would limit their operations to secure towns and refugee camps for those internally displaced by civil war in the region.

Last week GOAL was forced to suspend operations in parts of Northern Uganda after 22 years of work, due to the rapidly deteriorating security situation in the region.

In a statement, GOAL CEO John O’Shea said:
“The situation was too precarious for GOALies to operate in. This effectively means GOAL will no longer be able to support the 184,000 vulnerable displaced in the six camps in the war-ravaged region where GOAL operates.

“The worst thing is that it will inevitably be the most vulnerable and most needy that will suffer the most if and when more aid workers pull out.”

Nineteen years of war have devastated the north and uprooted more than 1.6 million people causing, what the UN has dubbed “one of the world’s worst and most neglected humanitarian crisis”. More than 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the rebels over the last five years, who are believed to make up 80% of the terrorist insurgency movement.

“It is a moral outrage that the world is doing so little for the victims of the war,” O’Shea said.

For more information please contact John O’Shea, CEO of GOAL :
(01) 280 9779 / 086 852 7427.