Community leaders pledge to protect LRA returnees

Forty eight former captives of the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), at bases inside southern Sudan, were on Saturday welcomed back to Uganda by northern community leaders, who promised them protection from the rebels, Reuters news agency reported. The 48 people involved, who were reluctant to talk of their time with the LRA, had all escaped from rebel camps in southern Sudan to a Sudanese government reception centre in Juba, Western Equatoria, where they were handed over to UNICEF and taken to Khartoum. The group was flown from the Sudanese capital to Entebbe Airport on Friday. UNICEF said Friday’s arrivals were the seventh group to be repatriated from Khartoum since December 1999, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Sudanese President Omar Hasan al-Bashir signed a reconciliation deal between the two countries, which included a provision for finding and returning the abductees, Reuters reported. Some 29 returnees have left by air for Kitgum District while 19 others left by road for Gulu, according to media reports. Another 25 former LRA captives were expected to arrive from Khartoum on Wednesday, 15 August, Reuters quoted UNICEF as saying. By then, about 285 people will have been repatriated under the agreement, while many more are believed to have escaped and made their own way home, it added.

The LRA, led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony, has waged a campaign of terror against the population of northern Uganda since early 1988 - ostensibly in a desire to have Uganda ruled according to the Ten Commandments of the Bible. Thousands of children have been abducted by the LRA over the years to form an army, including many child soldiers, and provide wives for Kony’s commanders. UNICEF and the Ugandan government estimate that the LRA has abducted more than 26,000 people, including 9,000 children, of which only about 5,000 are believed to have escaped or returned home. [see related IRIN stories at: http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/archive/uganda.phtml]