overseas media on Falun Gong

KAMPALA: Grinding poverty, rampant AIDS and regional conflicts were fertile soil for the doomsday cult that immolated hundreds of its members in a church blaze in southwestern Uganda last week.

Uganda has a history of fanatical or extreme religious sects, perhaps the most famous being Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement, which sprung up in northern Uganda in the 1980s.

Hundreds of her followers marched to their deaths believing magic oil would protect them from government bullets.

But everyday Ugandans were still shocked and bewildered as news emerged of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, whose members barricaded themselves in a church awaiting salvation only to end up being burnt alive.

Ironically, many of the dead were probably seeking a refuge they had not found elsewhere.

"These were desperate people - landless, unemployed and probably sick," Murindwa Rutanga, a political science lecturer at Kampala's Makerere University told reporters.

"The community provided a home and some basic services like medicine that the state and church had failed to provide," said Rutanga, an authority on cults in this region of Uganda.

The average income in Uganda is less than a dollar a day. AIDS has claimed an estimated 500,000 lives since 1982, and three times that number are thought to be infected.

Despite the government's efforts to tackle poverty, health care remains out of many people's reach and austere economic policies mean many of them stay poor.