Uganda, Sudan get back to business but leave LRA rebels off talks agenda
By Vincent Mayanja
KAMPALA, April 15 (AFP) — Even as mistrust festers between the neighbouring states, dozens of top officials from Sudan and Uganda opened major fence-mending talks in Kampala under the auspices of a joint ministerial commission that last convened in 1990.
Ugandan officials told AFP that the main bone of contention — Sudan’s alleged support for Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebellion (LRA) — was not even on the agenda of the two-day meeting, since it was being addressed in a separate forum.
This long-voiced accusation, and Khartoum’s parallel claim that Kampala backed the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), led diplomatic relations between Sudan and Uganda to be severed in 1995.
Ties were restored three years ago, a first step in a gradual process of rapprochement.
“The reactivation of the Uganda-Sudan Joint Ministerial Commission meeting is a timely event to further promote and strengthen ties of friendship, cooperation, mutual trust and confidence between the two countries,” Ugandan Deputy Premier and minister in charge of refugees, Moses Ali told the meeting.
The talks “will address several framework agreements including cooperation in security, voluntary repatriation of refugees, immigration and trade,” Ugandan foreign ministry permanent secretary Julius Onen said.
Agriculture, education and science are among the other topics on the agenda.
“There is no place on this planet for stand-alone nations, so we need to join hands to attain a better tomorrow for our people,” Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismael told the opening session.
He is among dozens of Sudanese officials in Kampala for the talks with a 50-strong Ugandan team headed by acting Foreign Minister Tom Butime.
Sudan is the second largest importer of Ugandan coffee following the European Union.
The meeting takes place as Khartoum and the SPLA are finalising a comprehensive deal to end a civil war that broke out in 1983.
“If we give a chance for peace to take root in Sudan, it will ramify in the entire region and eventually the agenda of conflicts, refugees and displaced persons will give way to a new agenda of development and reconstruction,” Ismael said.
But the war in northern Uganda continues to devastate the region and there is no sign of peace talks on the horizon, not least because nobody knows exactly what the LRA is fighting for, beyond a reported aim of setting up a government based on the Bible’s Ten Commandments.
The first of these admonishments — thou shalt not kill — has been broken thousands of times since the LRA took up arms in 1988.
More than a million civilians in northern Uganda have been forced to live in squalid camps and agricultural production is negligible.
Recent months have seen Kampala tone down its charges against Sudan.
LRA leader “Joseph Kony is hiding in an area controlled by a militia group under the control of the Sudanese government,” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said in December, a charge promptly denied in Khartoum.
On Thursday, Ugandan army spokesman Shaban Bantariza said that although the government had continued to make “repeated complaints” on the issue, these now focussed on “elements of the Sudanese army” rather than official support from Khartoum.
But according to the respected International Crisis Group, which issued a report on the LRA war on Wednesday, “Sudan continues to support the LRA from bases near Torit and Juba (in southern Sudan), which it claims are refugee camps.”
“Khartoum probably cannot completely cut its links to Kony until the Sudanese civil war is settled,” added the report.