LRA "colonel" returns to Kampala

Seven former combatants of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), including a former commander, on Thursday 31 January returned peacefully to Uganda under the terms of an amnesty offered by the Ugandan government. Former LRA Colonel Abdullah Sururu, reportedly former head of the Obagatech LRA camp in southern Sudan, had fled the rebel army because he realised the future of the rebel movement was uncertain, the New vision newspaper quoted him as saying on arrival at Entebbe airport, Kampala. Sururu, who said he joined the LRA in 1996, turned himself in to the Ugandan embassy in Khartoum in December 2001 along with six other former LRA combatants under the terms of the Amnesty Act, which came into force in December 1999 and covers "political crimes" committed from 26 January 1996 until the present day, Mads Oyen, Information Officer for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Kampala told IRIN on 31 January. In addition, six children abducted by the LRA some six years ago, who had escaped from LRA captivity in southern Sudan, were received at Entebbe along with the former LRA fighters by officials of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), International Organisation for Migration (IOM), and Ugandan government representatives, the New Vision newspaper reported on 31 January. The returnees appealed to the international community to "immediately take action to stop the terrorist acts meted out by the LRA on innocent Ugandans," AFP said. The group was subsequently transported to a rehabilitation centre run by nongovernmental organization World Vision in the northern town of Gulu. "They wanted to go home [to their families] but we advised that they should first go to the rehabilitation centres in northern Uganda for a debriefing," Oyen, who met the group at Entebbe, told IRIN on Thursday from Kampala. Elizabeth Speelman, World Vision psychosocial adviser for the Great Lakes region, told IRIN on Friday that the counselling the returnees would receive at the rehabilitation centre would depend on the level of psychological trauma they had suffered while in captivity. "Some children are not very traumatised so we try to send them back to their communities as soon as possible," she said. There was a danger, however, that some communities might reject the children, as some of them had participated in violent raids against their own villages, and sometimes against their own families, Speelman said. "Sometimes this takes a long process. Most of the children have done awful things while in the bush and we must help the communities to accept them," she added. According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), a total of 323 LRA abductees who escaped in southern Sudan during 2000-'01 have become part of a programme of repatriation to Uganda, under the auspices of UNICEF, the International Organisation for Migration and the governments of Uganda and Sudan. According to Oyen, since the start of the LRA insurgency, a total of 28,909 people have been abducted in northern Uganda, out of which 18,399 were adults. Some 5,555 abducted children were still missing, Oyen added. The LRA, led by Joseph Kony, has been fighting a guerilla-style war against Ugandan government forces since the late 1980s, ostensibly in a desire to have Uganda ruled according to the Ten Commandments of the Bible. Operating from rear bases in southern Sudan (and supported, at least until recently, by Sudan), the LRA has undertaken a campaign of terror in northern Uganda since the early 1990s - brutalising, killing, and looting the people of northern Uganda, abducting their children to act as fighters, sex slaves and porters for looted goods, and destroying their homes. However, it has become increasingly isolated in recent months, as Ugandan-Sudanese relations have improved, including through the exchange of envoys by Kampala and Khartoum, humanitarian sources said. Reported splits between LRA commanders, with the LRA command in southern Sudan largely cut off from several units operating in northern Uganda, had further weakened the rebel movement but also meant that LRA soldiers on the Uganda side were having to loot villages and abduct adolescents for forced labour as their supply lines dried up, sources said. The escape and return of LRA abducted children and adults from Sudan is being facilitated by a series of bilateral agreements between the governments of Sudan and Uganda, according to Oyen. In particular, the 1999 Nairobi Peace Agreement has raised hopes that child abductees being held in LRA strongholds in southern Sudan may soon be able to return home.