Ugandan rebels have violated a truce with the government by leaving an agreed assembly point, the head of an independent monitoring team said on Friday, in a blow to efforts to end one of Africa’s longest conflicts.
”We did not find them there … Because they were supposed to be there, it is automatically a violation,” Major General Wilson Deng Kuoirot told Reuters.
He said monitors found 45 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in the Owiny-Ki-Bul assembly point on the Sudan-Uganda border, compared with 800 reported last month.
Kuoirot said rebel reports that the area had been ringed by Ugandan UPDF army forces were unfounded.
A truce signed in August between the government and the LRA, one of Africa’s most feared guerrilla groups, lifted hopes of an end to a two-decade war that has killed tens of thousands and forced almost two million into squalid camps in northern Uganda.
But Kampala has claimed that the LRA has broken the truce and the LRA has accused Ugandan soldiers of encircling fighters assembled at one of two locations under the agreement, raising doubts over the future of the peace process. — Reuters