Ed Royce: “We are urging support for S. 2264, the Northern Uganda Crisis Response Act, and we are doing that because for the past…”

“We are urging support for S. 2264, the Northern Uganda Crisis Response Act, and we are doing that because for the past 18 years Northern Uganda has been embroiled in a particularly vicious conflict, one which pits Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's efforts at governance against a group called the Lord's Resistance Army. And the Lord's Resistance Army, designated as a terrorist organization by the Secretary of State, moves in small, well-coordinated groups from bases in southern Sudan, launching brutal attacks against civilian populations. They launch these attacks at night. Members of the Lord's Resistance Army have no clear political agenda; and, frankly, they make no attempts to hold territory. But what they do do and have done for these last 18 years is to murder and rape and loot with impunity. The devastation inflicted upon the civilian population during this war cannot be overstated. Frankly, it is unknown how many people have been killed, but we do know that more than 1.2 million people, 80 percent of the local population, have been displaced by the Lord's Resistance Army. Over 1.8 million people depend on food aid in an area that once served as the breadbasket of Uganda, and acute malnutrition of children under the age of 5 has risen 30 percent since December, 2002. Humanitarian operations have been severely hampered by the increasingly tenuous security situation there in Northern Uganda.”