Uganda on Tuesday for the first time closed a camp housing people displaced by civil war in the north, a symbolic step in the country’s drive to restore stability after two decades of conflict.
Ugandan Refugees Minister Musa Echweru and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees envoy to Kampala Stefano Severe closed the deserted Otwal camp — which was home to 18 000 people — by demolishing huts and planting trees.
”I declare the camp closed for God and my country,” Echweru said in the camp, about 300km north of Kampala.
The move comes as the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) it has been fighting since 1988 are trying to hammer out the final stages of a peace agreement.
”This displacement has had a serious impact on this area and its skeletons will remain for a long time. It is going to be a long journey to resettle these people. But when the resettlement is done, this area can be a food basket for the country,” Echweru added.
The nearby Agweng camp, which was home to 35 000 people, will be closed on Wednesday.
The closure of the 40 camps in the country’s Lango region, planned to be completed by mid-2008, results from improved security in northern Uganda.
The Kampala-LRA talks peace talks that opened in July last year and a ceasefire reached in August have helped improve security and freedom of movement in the region.
About 92% of about 466 000 refugees in the Lango region — where camps were established between 2002 and 2004 — at the height of the displacement in 2005, have returned to their villages.
By 2005, there were 1,8-million displaced people living in 242 camps.
Authorities will need $200 000 to close the first 40 camps, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement.
The deadly conflict has raged since 1988, when Joseph Kony took leadership of a two-year-old regional rebellion among northern Uganda’s ethnic Acholi minority, in a drive to establish of a government based on the biblical Ten Commandments. — Sapa-AFP