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KAMPALA (AFP) - United States First Lady Hillary Clinton has donated $1.5 million to help resettle and rehabilitate Uganda's children who have been traumatized by 13 years of war in northern Uganda, aid officials said Sunday. John Reinstein of Denmark's Save the Children agency branch in Gulu, 360 kilometers (225 miles) north of here, said by telephone from northern Uganda that the donation will be used to resettle, reintegrate and educate the war affected children. Clinton's donation, channeled through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is expected to go a long way, Reinstein said. Clinton had pledged to help when she visited Uganda in 1997, ahead of her husband's visit a year later. The children are a part of thousands abducted by insurgents in the area and forced to fight against government forces. The project, dubbed the Hillary Clinton Project, will be implemented by five local non-governmental organizations (NGO's) led by Save the Children to look after children rescued from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) of one-time Roman Catholic catechist Joseph Kony. The LRA, which has no conventional method of recruiting its fighters, abducts young girls and boys in northern Uganda, and takes them across the border to its bases in southern Sudan, where they are either turned into concubines or soldiers. Thousands of people have been displaced in northern Uganda and are currently living in congested and squalid camps, with inadequate food, medicine and sanitary facilities that often trigger disease epidemics. Uganda accuses Sudan of supporting the LRA that have been battling government forces for over a decade to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni's secular government and replace it with one based on the biblical Ten Commandments. Sudan counter-accuses Uganda of supporting the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) that has fought successive regimes in Khartoum since 1983 to end what they consider domination of the mainly animist and Christian southern Sudan by the Arab Muslim north. Both governments have repeatedly denied these charges. |
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