UN suspends repatriation to Sudan amid security concerns
Oct 23, 2006 (KAMPALA) — The United Nations refugee agency has suspended the repatriation of Sudanese refugees from Uganda after several violent incidents in southern Sudan during the past week, an official said on Monday.
Roberta Russo, spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Uganda, said plans to return 180 refugees to southern Sudan in a convoy of vehicles were abandoned on Friday after an attack in southern Sudan that killed at least 40 civilians.
“Because there were four ambushes [on Wednesday and Thursday], we cancelled a convoy that was heading to Kajo Keji carrying 180 returnees,” Russo told IRIN. “We shall not resume until we are sure the situation has improved. We will be monitoring the security situation closely.”
UNHCR has repatriated 14,000 refugees to southern Sudan since the signing in January 2005 of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended two decades of war between the Sudanese government and former rebels of the Sudan People Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). Some 4,500 of the returnees were from camps in Uganda.
The violence was first thought to have been related to conflict between the Ugandan government and the country’s rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Representatives of both parties are engaged in peace talks, mediated by the government of southern Sudan, in Juba. The Ugandan military has maintained a presence in southern Sudan since 2002 when it was allowed to cross the border in pursuit of LRA fighters who had bases there.
On Sunday, however, a South Sudanese government official, Maj-Gen Wilson Deng, said its forces had arrested some 15 South Sudanese soldiers who had raided Gumba, four kilometres from Juba, capital of South Sudan.
“We are still going on with the investigations since others are still on the run,” added Deng, who heads the team monitoring the truce signed between the Ugandan government and the LRA.
He said the raiders had confessed to being responsible for the ambushes.
According to UNHCR, there are 350,000 south Sudanese refugees in camps in Uganda and neighbouring countries, and another four million who remain internally displaced inside Sudan.
In a related development, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni went to Juba in a bid to speed up the peace talks between his government and the LRA. He told the LRA delegation, which had previously been reluctant to meet him, that he had come to Juba to support to the peace process.
“He said they should expedite the process because there are spoilers who are bent on frustrating the process,” Okello Oryen, the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs, said.
Museveni held talks with Sudan’s vice-president, Salva Kiir, who is also president of the South Sudanese government, and addressed parliament in Juba.
(IRIN)