Reuters AlertNet reports that the former U.N. representative for children in war, Olara Otunnu, said that the worst place in the world to be a child today is northern Uganda. “When adults wage war, children pay the highest price,” Olara Otunnu said in a speech in London. “Children are the primary victims of armed conflict.”

Almost 2 million people have been “herded like animals” into the camps in northern Uganda where 1,000 people are dying a week due to disease and violence, Otunnu said. He added that rape by government troops, many of them HIV positive, was common.

“An entire society is being destroyed in full view of the international community,” Otunnu said, calling on Western leaders to demand the Ugandan government dismantle the camps and send in international monitors. Otunnu, who was U.N. Under Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict from 1997 to 2005, said the situation in northern Uganda was far worse than in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region.