Former Ugandan rebel leader Alice Lakwena, who is in exile in a northern Kenya refugee camp, has demanded $50 000 from Uganda before she returns home, UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) officials said on Thursday.
”Two weeks ago, a delegation from Uganda visited Dadaab Refugee Camp in northeast Kenya and held discussions with Lakwena on the posibility of her repatriation,” said UNHCR spokesperson Emmanuel.
A Uganda official, who was in the delegation, said in Kampala that Lakwena, who has been exiled in Kenya for the last 16 years, wanted the Ugandan government to give her a resettlement fee and accommodation before she returns.
”She asked for 100-million Ugandan shillings ($50 000) as a resettlement fee and also demanded that the government secure her accommodation and outline a plan to compensate victims of the war in northen Uganda,” the official said.
Uganda’s Amnesty Commission chairperson Justice Peter Onega confirmed that the delegation visited Lakwena, who mobilised up to 7 000 fighters in northern Uganda, known as the Holy Spirit Army, to fight against Yoweri Museveni’s regime after he ousted the six-month-old military regime of General Tito Okello in January 1986.
Lakwena was known as the ”voodoo princess” because she ordered her followers to smear their bodies with oil, saying it would turn bullets fired at them by Museveni’s forces into harmless stones.
Initially, her army scored some victories over government troops, but they were later routed and Lakwena and several key fighters fled into exile in Kenya in 1987.
The struggle was taken over by her uncle Joseph Kony, a former Roman Catholic catechist, whose Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has since 1988 waged a bloody war against now President Museveni’s secular regime, supposedly to replace it with one based on the biblical Ten Commandments.
The war has maimed and killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 1,5-million others, forcing them to live in squalid camps dotting the northern region. – Sapa-AFP