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/ 1 September 2006
Uganda’s government prepared to deliver to a -million recovery plan to leaders of the war-ravaged north on Friday as peace talks raised hopes of an end to one of Africa’s longest insurgencies. About 1,7-million northerners are living in squalid camps having fled from two-decades of conflict between the military and cult-like rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony has accused government troops of violating a truce in his first comments since the start of an agreement seen as a major breakthrough in ending his 20-year insurgency. The military denied it and said it was ”religiously” observing the deal struck on Saturday that gives Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army guerrillas three weeks to assemble at camps in south Sudan.
Uganda’s army by Wednesday had not chosen the safe routes northern rebels are supposed to take from the bush to camps in southern Sudan as part of a truce that may mark the end of one of Africa’s longest wars. The delay in announcing the routes should not deter Lord’s Resistance Army guerrillas in the north from setting off on foot, a government spokesperson said.
A truce that could spell the end of one of Africa’s longest and most brutal wars came into effect on Tuesday, Uganda’s military said. Under the pact signed on Saturday at peace talks in southern Sudan, the fugitive rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have three weeks to assemble at two south Sudanese camps.
Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army on Monday ordered its forces to prepare for an imminent truce with the government under which they will move to neutral camps in southern Sudan. In recorded government-authorised messages broadcast over radio stations in war-ravaged northern Uganda, LRA commanders called on their fighters to come out of the bush.
Uganda has agreed to a conditional cessation of hostilities with rebels to end a brutal 19-year insurgency in the north of the country. The deal is dependent on the Lord’s Resistance Army sending its fighters to assembly points in southern Sudan and northern Uganda where they could be monitored.
The Ugandan army announced on Wednesday it had killed at least eight Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in the past week despite peace talks aimed at ending nearly 19 years of insurgency in the region. Army spokesperson Lieutenant Chris Magezi said the rebel fighters were slain during ambushes in the war-ravaged northern Gulu, Pader and Amur districts.
A fire at a Ugandan primary school killed six boys trapped in a dormitory, officials said on Tuesday. A charcoal stove placed by a wall started the blaze late on Monday. Fire then spread through a building of the army school in Jinja, about 80km east of the capital Kampala.
Thirty people were killed and four others seriously injured when a passenger minibus collided with a fuel tanker in central Uganda, police said on Monday. Police said 27 people on the bus died instantly, while three others suffocated as they scooped fuel that spilled from the Rwanda-bound tanker after the accident on Sunday.
Ugandan government officials met overnight with the elusive Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony ahead of the resumption of peace talks aimed at ending a 19-year-old insurgency, officials said on Monday. The spokesperson for the Ugandan delegation said Walter Ochora, a district commissioner for northern Uganda’s Gulu District, met the rebel supremo in Nabanga.
Uganda said on Sunday it might still attack Lord’s Resistance Army rebels camped in the Democratic Republic of Congo if peace talks hosted by neighbouring southern Sudan fail to end fighting in one of Africa’s longest wars. Kinshasa and the United Nations have refused repeated requests from Uganda to be allowed to send its troops into the DRC to hunt down the rebels themselves.
Uganda said on Thursday it will organise a trip next week for relatives of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, including LRA supremo Joseph Kony’s mother, to visit their kin at a jungle hideout. ”This is a confidence-building measure,” Ugandan delegation spokesperson Paddy Ankunda said from the southern Sudanese capital of Juba.
The widespread adoption of male circumcision throughout Africa could avert up to 5,7-million HIV infections by 2026. According to a scientific study published in Public Library of Science Medicine, male circumcision could avert two million new infections and 300 000 deaths over the next 10 years.
A senior Ugandan official on Wednesday urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to quash its war-crimes indictments against the leaders of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, in a bid to encourage the rebels into peace talks with the government in Kampala. The peace talks had been due to start in southern Sudan on Wednesday.
Uganda added more than a month to a deadline for thrashing out a peace deal with northern rebels on Monday, boosting landmark talks this week that will aim to end one of Africa’s most neglected wars. Tentative discussions between Ugandan officials and representatives of the Lord’s Resistance Army are due to begin on Wednesday in Juba, in neighbouring southern Sudan.
Uganda will enter talks with leaders of the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army guerrillas without preconditions if they give up arms and denounce war, a government spokesperson said on Tuesday. The government will also be willing to pardon rebel commander Joseph Kony and his four commanders who are wanted for trial by the United Nation’s International Criminal Court.
Bush-meat trade is threatening a possible depletion of Africa’s great apes, the world’s leading chimpanzee and gorilla conservationist, Jane Goodall, warned on Thursday. She said corruption and commercial interests involving logging companies are making conservation efforts futile.
The move by the United States to sign free-trade agreements with the Andean countries of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador will harm thousands of small farmers, Oxfam has warned. The agreements will block access to affordable medicines and favour foreign investors, says Oxfam in a new report.
President Yoweri Museveni’s brother was sworn in on Friday as Uganda’s Finance Minister, prompting complaints about the man’s history of financial scandal. Salim Saleh was among 69 new ministers appointed by Museveni, who was re-elected in February for a third term as head of this east African nation.
Uganda is among six African countries that have met the 2001 United Nations Declaration of Commitment on HIV/Aids and reduced HIV prevalence among young people by 25%, according to the 2006 report on the global Aids epidemic by the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/Aids.
Ugandan troops have killed a gunman who shot dead at least 10 civilians this week in a bloody rampage at a camp for war-displaced people in northern Uganda, the military said on Thursday. Soldiers had been looking for the man, a militia member responsible for guarding the Ogwete camp for internally displaced people, since he fled the area after Monday’s killing spree.
Uganda on Wednesday set a July deadline for the leader of the notorious rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to end a nearly two-decade insurgency and agree to peace talks or face military destruction. President Yoweri Museveni said his government would assure the safety of LRA supremo Joseph Kony and four lieutenants indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
Lawmakers in Uganda’s first multi-party Parliament in two decades took their oaths of office on Tuesday after being elected in February following the repeal of a ban on political pluralism. Members of the 308-seat legislature from five parties pledged to "uphold, preserve and defend the Constitution" as well as give "faithful service to Parliament".
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni took his third oath of office on Friday, formally extending his 21-year rule in an inauguration ceremony held amid concerns about his commitment to democracy. Museveni, who first came to power in a 1986 coup but has been elected three times since, enters his third term facing a series of weighty challenges.
Wildlife authorities said on Wednesday they had been forced to euthanise ”Big Mama”, a giant 52-year-old Nile crocodile that had been a star attraction at a Ugandan zoo for nearly half a century. Keepers at the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre in Entebbe, south of the capital, put down the ailing reptile at the weekend.
As the sun dips behind the evening clouds, staining the equatorial sky a brilliant orange, seven-year-old Josephine Atim pounds away at rocks with an aging and worn hammer. ”I am breaking these stones to make some money,” she whispers shyly, pausing briefly as dozens of other youngsters continue to smash stones into pebbles to earn a meagre wage.
In a bizarre twist to the treason trial of Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye, the defence on Wednesday accused the government of coaching the lead prosecution witness with a hidden radio set. Defence lawyer Caleb Alaka stunned a packed courtroom by claiming that the testimony of the witness, Jennifer Aryemo, was being directed by unidentified government agents through an earpiece concealed in an elaborate disguise.
A seemingly minor affair involving a Rwandan diplomat and the wife of a Ugandan businessman has reignited tensions between the feuding neighbours with the Rwandan government expelling a Ugandan diplomat and accusing Kampala of harbouring Rwandan dissidents.
Longstanding rivalry between Rwanda and Uganda took a new twist on Monday after Ugandan security forces photographed and arrested a Rwandan diplomat naked in bed with the wife of a Ugandan businessman. The incident involves John Ngarambe, the first secretary at Rwanda’s embassy in Kampala, who was detained along with the woman late on Saturday at an upscale hotel near Lake Victoria.
At least 13 children were killed and several injured when a fire razed the dormitory of a school in western Uganda, police said on Friday. The overnight Thursday blaze is suspected to have started after candle flames caught bedsheets and then spread throughout the dormitory of the Islamic Kabarole East Primary School.
The rate of violent deaths in war-ravaged Northern Uganda is three times higher than in Iraq, and the East African country’s 20-year insurgency has cost ,7-billion, according to a report released on Thursday. There are now about 146 deaths a week among Northern Uganda’s estimated population of five million, or 0,17 violent deaths per 10Â 000 people per day.
The Ugandan authorities have shut down a radio station that allegedly aired a talk show critical of the country’s military and ruling party, media watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said on Wednesday. The New York-based CPJ said police shut Choice FM based in the northern town of Gulu on Monday after it aired the show in which an opposition politician criticised local civilian and military authorities for alleged corruption.