Uganda dismisses arms charge from Sudan as “falsehood”
KAMPALA, Oct 11 (AFP) — Uganda on Monday denied charges that it has supplied rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) with heavy weaponry, saying such a supply would jeopadise good relations already developed between the two armies.
“We are not arms suppliers to any one in the region,” army spokesman Major Shaban Bantariza told AFP by telephone.
“We have got good cooperation from the Sudanese army officers and we cannot spoil it now,” Bantariza added.
Sudan’s semi-state Media Centre quoted Sudanese officials as charging that the Ugandan government had shipped weapons across the border into SPLA-controlled areas in southern Sudan last week.
“Kampala has provided these weapons so that the SPLA could (launch) an attack against the Sudanese army” which would coincide with an offensive by two main rebels groups in Sudan’s western region of Darfur,” the report said.
“If such a thing had happened, the officers in Juba would have raised it with us, which they haven’t. The report should be ignored for its falsehood,” Bantariza said.
Kampala and Khartoum have in the past traded accusations over support for each other’s rebels.
Uganda has repeatedly accused of assisting the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that has been waging a bloody war against government forces in northern Uganda since 1988 from bases in southern Sudan.
Khartoum has countered that Uganda supports and arms the SPLA, which has been fighting Sudanese forces to end domination of mainly Christian and animist southern Sudan by the Arabised, Muslim north.
The Sudan government and the SPLA kicked off a fresh round of talks in Kenya on October 7 in a bid to end the 21-year-old conflict, Africa’s longest-running civil war.
Khartoum allowed Uganda in 2002 to deploy its military on Sudanese soil to search and destroy LRA bases on its territory, forcing the LRA to abandon its bases inside Sudan and crossed over to Uganda to resume a violent campaign that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced 1.6 million others, who now live in squalid camp in northern region.