Uganda, Sudan agree on voluntary refugee returns
By Daniel Wallis
KAMPALA, April 16 (Reuters) – Sudanese refugees in Uganda will be able to start returning home soon after ministers from both countries agreed to assist voluntary repatriations, Uganda’s foreign minister said on Friday.
More than 200,000 Sudanese refugees live in Uganda after fleeing more than two decades of civil war in the country’s giant northern neighbor.
“Everything possible will be done so that these people can go home and begin to start a new life,” Thomas Butime told a news conference in the Ugandan capital Kampala.
Butime did not give any more details. His comments followed two days of ministerial-level talks aimed at improving Uganda and Sudan’s often fractious relations.
Ties between the two east African neighbors 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 border.
The United Nations refugee agency says there are 223,000 Sudanese refugees in Uganda. More than 250,000 Ugandan refugees who fled to Sudan were repatriated toward the end of the 1980s.
Relations began to thaw in December 1999 when the two countries agreed to re-establish diplomatic links and promote peace in their frontier area.
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 neighbors struck a deal in 2002 to allow Uganda’s army to pursue the LRA rebels into Sudan.
Sudanese government officials have accused Uganda of supporting insurgents from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
“We are cooperating in order to deal with the LRA,” Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, told reporters. “That work is going on very well.”
Butime said security issues had not been discussed in detail at the Kampala talks, and were instead being handled by the security and defense ministries of both nations.
Officials at the talks in Kampala said they had laid the groundwork for better co-operation on several issues.
Ismail said agreements had been signed on agricultural, animals and fisheries resources, foreign ministerial cooperation and a broad framework cooperation agreement.