Ugandan army kills 15 rebels in Sudan

Sept 24, 2005 (KAMPALA) — Ugandan troops killed 15 rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in a gun battle in remote southern Sudan, the military said on Saturday.

For 19 years the cult-like LRA has terrorised isolated communities on both sides of the border, uprooting 1.6 million people in northern Uganda alone and triggering what aid workers call one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Uganda’s army spokesman said soldiers attacked one group of LRA rebels on Friday about 50 km (31 miles) into Sudan.

“We caught up with a group of rebels under the command of one Major Charles Okello by the River Atepi, south of the Kit Valley, and killed 15 of them,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Shaban Bantariza.

Under a 2002 deal with Khartoum, Ugandan troops can pursue the rebels into southern Sudan, but only as far as the road between the towns of Juba and Torit, some 100 km north of the Ugandan border.

Joseph Kony, the LRA’s elusive self-proclaimed prophet and leader, is believed to be on the run inside southern Sudan and to have retreated last month behind the so-called Red Line.

According to the Ugandan army, his deputy Vincent Otti and about 50 fighters fled to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday and sought political asylum there.

Bantariza denied a report by a radio station that said Ugandan troops had pursued Otti into the Congolese jungles.

“We have not even advanced one inch into DRC,” he said.

He said senior officers from the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo, MONUC, met Uganda’s army commander Lt-Gen Aronda Nyakairima on Friday to discuss the rebels’ presence in DRC.

The LRA, which is founded on religious symbolism, traditional rites and fear, has never given a clear account of its aims beyond opposing Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni.

It is notorious for massacring civilians, mutilating survivors and abducting thousands of children who are forced to become fighters, porters and sex slaves.

(Reuters)