Uganda and Sudan hope to repair ties through talks

By Daniel Wallis

KAMPALA, April 15 (Reuters) – Uganda and Sudan launched talks on Thursday aimed at improving their often fractious relations, partly by discussing the eventual repatriation of more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees, officials said.

Ties between the two neighbours have been strained in previous years over mutual allegations of supporting each other’s rebels in civil wars that have sent hundreds of thousands of people flowing across their mutual border.

Relations began to thaw in December 1999 when the two countries agreed to re-establish diplomatic links and promote peace in their frontier area, but officials said they hoped the latest meeting would improve ties further.

“This is a special and historic occasion,” Uganda’s First Deputy Prime Minister, Lieutenant General Moses Ali, told delegates at a hotel in the Ugandan capital Kampala.

“Uganda pledges enhanced cooperation with our Sudanese brothers and sisters to ensure the continued growth of both our peoples,” he said of their two-day ministerial-level talks.

Ali said the talks would focus on trade, investment, health, education, customs and immigration as well as the possible repatriation of Sudanese refugees from Uganda, although there was no word of any plans to move them back in the near future.

The United Nations refugee agency says there are 223,000 Sudanese refugees who fled more than two decades of civil war to come to Uganda. More than 250,000 Ugandan refugees who fled to Sudan were repatriated towards the end of the 1980s.

Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, said relations between the two countries were improving.

“The agenda of refugees, conflict and displacement will give way to a new agenda of development,” he told delegates.

Kampala for years accused Sudan of backing the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) that has battled government troops for 18 years in northern Uganda, until the neighbours struck a deal in 2002 to allow Uganda’s army to pursue the LRA rebels into Sudan.

In turn, Sudanese government officials accused Uganda of supporting insurgents from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

The 2002 deal allowing Ugandan troops into southern Sudan has been extended frequently and was last month pushed to May 31, when for the first time Sudan agreed to allow Uganda to use aircraft inside Sudan’s airspace to flush out the rebels.

Uganda believes the elusive LRA leader Joseph Kony and his top commanders are based in southern Sudan, and Sudan’s cooperation in the border area is key to Uganda’s military strategy for ending the LRA rebellion.