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
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.
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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/ 4 September 2006
Bands of Lord’s Resistance Army rebels trekked out of hideouts in northern Uganda on Monday, officials said, raising hopes that a landmark truce could signal an end to years of devastating war. They said several hundred fighters, including top field commanders, were moving in groups and had requested government help.
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/ 10 February 2006
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Investigations by leaders in northern Uganda’s Lira District have found that the death toll in the February 21 rebel attack on the Barlonyo camp for internally displaced persons exceeded 300 people, relief workers said.
Relief agencies working in northern Uganda on Thursday urged the government to dismantle camps housing displaced persons, saying they lacked adequate security.
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/ 25 February 2003
Uganda’s war-ravished northern provinces are in worse shape than at any time since the fighting began 15 years ago, according to United Nations officials. Recently 17 children were abducted in northern Uganda by the rebels, who will train them to fight the Ugandan army
Uganda was on Tuesday halfway through withdrawing some 500 of its soldiers from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northern town of Gbadolite.