UN emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, currently on a regional humanitarian assessment mission to Uganda, on Saturday called upon the international community to help avert a humanitarian crisis faced by over 1.5 million people displaced by the civil war in northern Uganda, DPA reported. Egeland, who is also UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, told reporters at the end of his 3-day visit to Uganda that although violence by the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) guerillas has scaled down, civilians are dying from diseases and malnutrition in congested camps for the displaced. "The victims of the war are being neglected to a high degree and suffering is unabated. We need to do more as an international community. I have met mothers who have lost children to the LRA. There are few places on earth where terror has been unleashed to that extent," Egeland told a news conference. "The impression I got is that the scale of violence has gone down but the number of deaths associated with the conflict is intolerably high, people die from consequences of living in overcrowded camps and from diseases," he said.
