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/ 28 March 2008

Northern Uganda awaits final peace

Peace is about to break out across war-torn northern Uganda, with a formal accord making it official expected to be signed on March 28. Many people here are already looking to a future without conflict. About 1,7-million people across northern Uganda have been displaced by the two-decade war.

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/ 11 November 2007

Brutal Ugandan rebels ask for forgiveness

Five years ago, Ugandan rebels bayoneted Ellen Atim’s husband and five of her children to death. Atim narrowly escaped and fled with her surviving children to a displacement camp where they have eked out a meagre existence ever since. Yet she says she is prepared to forgive the rebels who tore her family and life apart.

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/ 6 October 2006

Ugandans in war-torn north lose faith in peace

Nursing her infant on a dusty pavement outside her printing shop in war-weary Gulu, Mary Amito says she isn’t convinced the recent talk of peace for northern Uganda will mean the end of 20 years of war. ”It’s going to start all over again,” she said, casting her eyes at a pile of stagnant rubbish gathering in a pothole.

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/ 10 February 2006

Portrait of Uganda’s rebel prophet, painted by wives

His rebel group is one of world’s most notorious, reviled for an incongruous mix of religion and brutality, but Joseph Kony, the chief of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, is a mystery to most. For nearly 20 years, the elusive guerrilla supremo’s fighters have terrorised vast swathes of northern Uganda with an unholy blend of murder and wanton destruction.

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/ 8 February 2006

Uganda’s heart of darkness

One-by-one the words, bizarre and horrific, spout from the mouth of Alice as she recounts the terror and abuse she suffered as a child slave for Uganda’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army. ”They cut off three [people’s] heads and I was forced to use them as stones to hold the saucepan,” the 17-year-old said, describing her punishment for trying to run away.

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/ 27 July 2005

War-torn Uganda shrugs at referendum

Far from the capital where the merits of democracy are debated in earnest, the impoverished residents of war-ravaged northern Uganda see little point in this week’s referendum on restoring multiparty politics. Caught in a conflict nearly as old as the 20-year-old ban on political pluralism which President Yoweri Museveni now wants to repeal via Thursday’s vote, Ugandans are more concerned with peace than politics.

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/ 25 July 2005

‘This war will never end’

Terecina Ayo remembers the night rebel fighters attacked, hacking to death her 12-year-old nephew and 13-year-old niece, abducting other villagers and torching thatched huts. The widow says she survived that night four years ago by running into the bush. But she and many other survivors in northern Uganda are nonetheless scarred.

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/ 10 June 2005

Africa’s forgotten war

Margaret Okello was nine months pregnant when soldiers from the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army came into her village outside the Northern Ugandan town of Gulu. They dragged her deep into the bush of the surrounding savannah and cut off her nose, ears and lips.

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/ 29 March 2005

Is the road to hell paved with good intentions?

Walking in the eerie darkness engulfing Noah’s Ark, a centre that children in northern Uganda escape to for fear of being kidnapped by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), it is easy to see why so many in the region are eager for peace. Although a handful of the several hundred children who gather here every night are now singing sweetly for a group of visitors, the 19-year battle between government and the LRA has scarred their lives.

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/ 10 December 2004

Spare Uganda’s women and children, UN urges

Uganda’s government must do what it can to protect children and women from violence, while the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army must immediately and unconditionally stop abducting, killing and exploiting Uganda’s children, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Thursday. "Children are being killed and raped," it said.

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/ 2 November 2004

Radio programme reaches out to rebels

Johny Lacambel, a local radio presenter, offers his two guests some soda before asking the tall dark male with an amputated limb to lead in prayers as the programme begins. The trice-weekly <i>Dwog Paco</i>, the local Acholi language for "come back home," is credited with touching many hearts and convincing a number of Ugandan rebels to surrender.