Five refugees killed in LRA attack

Rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) on Monday night attacked a refugee settlement in north-western Uganda, killing five refugees and a government soldier, the UN refugee agency reported.

"According to available details, a group of LRA rebels, numbering 150 to 200, raided sites 9 and 11 of the Maaji Settlement [in Adjumani District]," UNHCR said in a statement.

During the attack on the two camps, the rebels also burned down some 127 houses, five classrooms in a refugee school, and looted the dispensary, UNHCR added.

Of the 180,000 refugees living in Uganda, 87 percent are southern Sudanese who are housed in camps in the north of the country and who have little prospect of repatriation as a result of Sudan's ongoing civil war, UNHCR said in its 2002 Global Appeal.

In a separate incident, also on Monday, LRA guerrillas carried out an attack on an Italian mission station near the town of Iceme, some 280 km north of Kampala, and about 100 km south of the Uganda-Sudan border.

"A group of rebels attacked at about 6 am, looted the place, burned three vehicles and part of the main school building, and abducted 40 to 50 people to carry their loot," Father Lino of the Comboni Mission in Kampala told IRIN on Wednesday.

According to Lino, almost all the abductees had subsequently been released or had escaped, leaving only "two or three" people to be accounted for. This was the third time the mission school at Iceme had been attacked by the LRA over a 10-year period.

All students at the Iceme mission school for girls had been moved out following an attack about 10 days ago on the nearby Iceme trading centre, he added.

In March 2002, with the permission of Sudanese government, the Uganda People's Defence Force began to pursue the LRA in southern Sudan. The operation, code-named "Operation Iron Fist", which has driven the rebel group into the Imatong hills in southern Sudan, has come under severe criticism from church and peace groups opposed to a military solution to the conflict.

Although the current anti-LRA operation was the most serious attempt to destroy rebel bases to date, the Ugandan army lacked the technical capacity to successfully defeat a guerrilla enemy, and had forced some rebels back into Uganda, Lino said.

"They have certainly forced them to come into Uganda. Some of these rebels are battle-hardened, they are good fighters," he warned.