Almost thirty conflicts have raged annually since the end of the cold war; many of them in Africa. The Great-lakes region of Africa is one of the volatile epicentres of violence and conflict. It has experienced from the last decades Holocaust and genocides. The complexities of the conflicts in that region have been found largely incomprehensible or with not enough interest for the international community until more than 4 million victims were lost in the conflict (Boneza 2005). The countries of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda compose the East and Central regions of Africa and together they are the Region of the Great Lakes. Although they are all separate entities, they are bounded by the many diverse and similar ethnic groups as well as historical legacy of colonialism that has planted the torment experienced today in the area.

The Great Lakes Region of Africa’s main plagues are: poverty, political instability, armed conflicts and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The troubles will hinder any development endeavour if appropriate measures are not taken quickly in order to reduce the poverty, put an end to insecurity and armed conflict, and control HIV/AIDS. Internal armed conflicts that some countries in the sub region have faced have resulted in the massive and prolonged displacement of the populations. "A titre examplatif", the number of displaced people owing to the wars that broke out in the DRC since 1997 to 2003 amounts to 3,000,000. The forced spatial mobility has resulted in a splitting and recombining of families. The affected population came mainly, on the one hand, from the East and North East of the DRC.

The main purpose of this paper is to present the provisional results of the study on the effect of conflicts on the health vulnerability toward for displaced persons. With a focus on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The study of the effect will deal essentially with the scenarios of the diffusion and propagation of the HIV/AIDS. We shall seek to bring to the fore the men/women vulnerability differential in the different areas under investigation. The study rests on the analysis of documents published on the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Armed conflicts have long been associated with disease outbreaks by creating the necessary conditions for epidemics explosion: destruction of infrastructure including water supply and sanitation facilities, displacing civilians and creating refugees who are often driven in overcrowded and unsanitary settlements. As in the 40’s, the World War One (WW1) may have been responsible for the great flu pandemic of 1918 that killed at least 40 million people(1) The authors of a report published in The Lancet when reviewing past mortality and morbidity reports from the early part of 20^th century found evidence in the years preceding the 1918 pandemic of sentinel outbreaks at training camps and barracks in the UK, where many young soldiers were succumbing to a pneumonic like illness and rapidly dying after a short time.

The barracks with their dormitory-like buildings were ideal for dissemination OF air-borne disease. When these young men were sent off to the war front, there they came in contact with hundreds of thousands of other soldiers, allowing the virus to spread, change and mutate and become even more virulent. The frontlines had all the conditions of refugee camps, with hundreds of thousands of young men living in squalid unsanitary, overcrowded camps, ideal areas for the spread of disease. When the soldiers left the frontlines and returned home, they came back carrying more lethal forms of the bug and re-introduced it into the civilian population.

As for Great-lakes, Armed conflicts have killed for the last decades more than 7 millions and brought suffering to millions more and setback development. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the war that followed to drive out the Hutu supposed perpetrators forced them into the jungles of neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and created a huge refugee crisis.

For example in the D.R.Congo Ebola virus was first isolated in 1976. Further outbreaks have occurred in Democratic Republic of the Congo (1995 and 2003), Gabon (1994, 1995 and 1996), Uganda (2000), and Sudan again (2004). A new species was identified from a single human case in Côte d'Ivoire in 1994, Ivory Coast Ebola virus (ICEBOV). In 2003, 120 people died in Etoumbi, Republic of Congo, which has been the site of more outbreaks, including one in May 2005.

The hypothesis here is that refugees driven into the jungles of the Congo, or soldiers fighting in the DRC, will invade the habitat of the natural host of the Ebola virus (to date the host is still unknown, but is presumed to be a monkey or a wild animal), or even worse will be exposed to even more hitherto unknown lethal diseases that will escape into the general human population.

In West Africa, researchers are alerting people to an increase in outbreaks of haemorrhagic fevers, possibly due to increased contact between man and animals especially monkeys that may be the reservoir for Ebola. Liberia and Sierra Leone are two countries that have just come out of civil wars that created large numbers of refugees displaced into the surrounding jungles. Some epidemic diseases are making resurgence due to wars in Africa and putting people at risk. Also there has been some reappearance of epidemical diseases such as typhus Burundi in 1997 after an absence of twelve years associated with the civil war that broke out in 1993. Typhus is spread by lice and epidemics are associated with high density populations such as in refugee camps (2).

In the last decade, countries in the Great Lakes Region were considered the epicentre of the epidemic because of the high prevalence rates and the socio-economic impact on the populations. During this period the Great Lakes Region also faced unbearable years of turmoil, war and armed conflict across borders. There was mass movement of armies, displacement and migration of entire communities from one.

3. a. Uganda case

In 1979 the Uganda / Tanzania war had contributed to the spreading of HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Geographers at Cambridge University, UK suggested the spread of AIDS could be traced back to the route the fleeing soldiers of Idi Amin’s defeated army took in 1979 while being pursued by Tanzanian soldiers. They concluded that the ethnic base and reported spatial pattern of AIDS is significantly related to the ethnic composition of the defeated Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) in 1979. In this instance war enabled the escape of the virus out of South West Uganda as the soldiers seeded it along the route from the South to the North of Uganda.  This could help explain the spread of AIDS from the South to its secondary focus in the North of Uganda (3).

Since the epidemic began, more than 60 million people have been infected with the virus worldwide. HIV/AIDS is one of the leading killers in Africa, where there are now more than 28 million people infected (4). In 2002, a meeting held in New York, hosted by UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, and discussed the effects of war on the spread of disease. The meeting was seeking to address the concerns in light of earlier U.N. Security Council resolutions (including Resolution 1308) on the role of conflict in the spread of the disease (5).