Clash over south Sudan village kills 40: militia
By Frank Nyakairu
KAMPALA, July 27 (Reuters) – Ugandan rebels and Sudanese militia killed at least 40 civilians as they battled for control of a remote village in southern Sudan, militia leaders and a church official said on Tuesday.
The Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels briefly seized the village of Moti at the weekend but were forced out by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and allied Equatoria Defence Force, EDF Secretary-General Charles Kisanga said.
“EDF forces moved back into Moti after a tactical withdrawal from the village … following heavy fighting with Ugandan LRA rebels who were aided by the government of Sudan’s logistics and helicopter gunships,” Kisanga said in a statement.
EDF officials said 41 people were killed in the battle. The Sudanese EDF militia is a former Khartoum ally which switched sides and threw in its lot with the rebel SPLA earlier this year. The SPLA has been fighting Khartoum for two decades in a conflict unrelated to that in Sudan’s remote Darfur region.
The cult-like LRA has waged an 18-year-old insurgency in northern Uganda, forcing some 1.6 million people to flee their homes. They have been operating from bases in southern Sudan, where aid workers say they are terrorising locals.
The Ugandan army, which is allowed to pursue the rebels into southern Sudan under a 2002 accord, said it was not involved in the latest fighting.
Religious leaders in northern Uganda and southern Sudan said the international community must push Khartoum to stop backing the LRA, calling its response to the conflict so far “intermittent, uncoordinated and insufficient”.
“The governments of neighbouring countries, regional and international bodies should put sustained pressure on the government of Sudan to urgently cease all support to the LRA,” said a statement issued by Ugandan and Sudanese church leaders and received by Reuters on Tuesday.
The church leaders met in northern Uganda last week to discuss peace efforts.
Sudan says it has ended the support it gave the LRA in the 1990s, but analysts say the Islamist government still gives covert backing in retaliation for Uganda’s support for the SPLA.
Khartoum has made significant progress towards ending the civil war in the south over the past two years, but is under renewed international pressure over the conflict in Darfur, where a campaign by Arab militias has been labelled genocide by the U.S. Congress.
Reverend Paul Yugusuk, head of the Anglican church in southern Sudan’s archdeaconry of Lomega, told the Sudan Tribune newspaper that 41 people were killed in Moti and that 9,000 had been forced from their homes by recent fighting in the area.
Ugandan officials say the LRA is on its last legs, with new equipment such as gunships helping to quell the insurgency by allowing the military to chase down rebels quickly.