Anna Borzello in Kampala
The 42 Sudanese prisoners sat at the edge of Entebbe airport. Despite spending more than a year in military prison, they looked in reasonable health – with the exception of a man who was said to have gone mad in captivity.
A Sudanese government delegation arrived by jet from Khartoum and after a brief ceremony with a Ugandan security team the prisoners were led to the plane. Their release came as a surprise.
The soldiers are among 114 captured on April 9 last year during a joint offensive by Ugandan troops and Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebels. The allies overran camps belonging to the Ugandan rebel Lords Resistance Army (LRA), which has operated out of bases in government- held territory in southern Sudan since 1994.
The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, said repeatedly that he would only release the captives if Sudan put pressure on the LRA to release 20 convent girls abducted from Aboke in northern Uganda in 1996.
The LRA, which is deployed by Sudan as a militia against the Ugandan-backed SPLA, is made up mainly of children abducted from villages and schools across northern Uganda. The United Nation Children’s Fund says 10 000 have been taken in the past three years alone.
The original plan was for the LRA to release the girls in northern Uganda on May 14. The LRA was supposed to hand the girls over to a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Vatican-based Comunita Di S Egidio.
But Ugandan government sources said the rebels failed even to bring the girls from southern Sudan. They claimed that the LRA entered Uganda with the intention of abducting ICRC officials to attract publicity. In turn, the LRA denied the charge and claimed that the Ugandan government intended to kill ICRC officials – and then blame the LRA.
A senior member of the Sudanese delegation acknowledged at the prisoner handover that the release of the girls had fallen through. But he said Sudan would continue to “excercise its influence” over the LRA to secure their freedom. Ugandan officials said they had released a third of the prisoners as a “goodwill” gesture.