Ugandan army withdrawn from near LRA in S. Sudan

Nov 23 (KAMPALA) — The Ugandan army has withdrawn from parts of southern Sudan, removing an obstacle to a peace deal with rebels to end one of Africa’s longest wars, the head of a truce monitoring team said on Thursday.

This month the government and Lord’s Resistance Army rebels renewed a landmark truce that many hope will end a two-decade conflict that has killed thousands and displaced 1.7 million.

The agreement gives the rebels until next month to assemble in two areas in south Sudan while peace talks continue in its capital, Juba. The locations are Ri-Kwangba, on the Congo border near the LRA leaders’ jungle hideouts and Owiny-Ki-Bul on the Uganda border.

The rebels missed a deadline to assemble in September, accusing the Ugandan army of besieging Owiny-Ki-Bul.

To build confidence, the army this month pledged to withdraw from three points in south Sudan — Magwi, Palutaka and Tibika — areas that the LRA had said were sheltering Ugandan troops.

“The army have withdrawn from those areas of south Sudan,” Major-General Wilson Deng Kuoirot, the head of the truce monitoring team, told Reuters by satellite phone from Juba.

“Today we visited Palutaka and Tibika, the UPDF (Uganda People’s Defence Forces) are not there,” he said, adding that their absence from Magwi had been confirmed earlier.

Kuoirot said the onus was on the LRA to assemble, as their professed fears of being surrounded were no longer justified.

“UPDF has withdrawn. Now they have to assemble,” he said.

U.N. Humanitarian chief Jan Egeland visited south Sudan this month to boost the peace talks. He met elusive LRA leader Joseph Kony, but failed to secure an agreement from him to release women, children and wounded in LRA captivity.

Egeland told U.N. officials on Wednesday donors would fund water, food and medicines for the assembly areas to make it attractive for the LRA to assemble.

Some fear the LRA leaders will never sign a peace deal unless indictments against them at the International Criminal Court are dropped, something the Hague-based court’s prosecutors have said they cannot do.

Kony, Otti and three other commanders are wanted for war crimes like killing civilians, rape, torture, mutilation and kidnapping thousands of children to swell their ranks.

President Yoweri Museveni has said an amnesty could be possible, but only after a final peace deal.

(Reuters)