Government unveils a US $336 million resettlement package for the north

Uganda on Thursday announced a three-year US $336 million emergency action plan to facilitate the return of internally displaced persons (IDPs) to their villages and to return law enforcement in the war-affected region to local police, officials said.

Prime Minister Apollo Nsibambi said the plan would allow almost two million people displaced by 20 years of fighting to return to their villages and resume their lives while civilian police were deployed in every county.

The government and rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) negotiators signed a ‘cessation of hostilities’ pact on Saturday, paving the way for lasting peace in the region.

Nsibambi said the first six-month phase of the plan, worth about $10.2 million and funded by the government, had been launched. It would fund the deployment of 2,000 additional policemen in the region and open up roads for delivery of aid.

“This is a short-term and medium-term measure to help our people voluntarily return to their homes by first and foremost providing security,” Nsibambi said.

Amid optimism that the protracted conflict in the north of the country could soon end, Nsibambi said that under the National Peace, Recovery and Development Plan for Northern Uganda, ‘resettlement kits’ containing agricultural implements, seeds and food would be distributed to the returnees, while judicial services and other conflict-handling mechanisms are re-established.

“The return of the IDPs will be voluntary and the returnees will be mobilised into productive activities,” he added. “De-mining will be done and people will be sensitised towards any suspicious objects in their midst.”

The plan will also tackle the general emergency rehabilitation of the war-affected districts, addressing issues such as healthcare and protection from Karamoja cattle rustlers, who had become another security threat.

The government army started pulling out of its combat positions on Wednesday but although the rebels said they were committed to the process, the rebel chief, Joseph Kony, expressed reservations over the seven main exit routes, saying some passed through rivers that had flooded.

During a call-in radio programme at a local station, MEGA FM, he said some of the routes the army had chosen were infested with landmines, which put his soldiers at risk.

"It is unfair for the army to order the LRA not to make any movement southwards, yet most of my field commanders need to send messengers on foot to gather my soldiers, to assemble in one area before they begin to move," Kony noted.

"I am committed to peace. I am ready to go to Owiny-Ki-Bul even if it means being killed. The world will then know that Kony was killed in the name of peace," he said in a satellite call from an undisclosed location to the radio station in the northern Ugandan town of Gulu, the epicentre of the violence.

Meanwhile, the Ugandan State Minister for Defence, Ruth Nankabirwa, said the government was aware that the LRA was “in motion and moving towards the assembly points. So far so good, nothing alarming has been reported,” she said.

She said government was considering dropping leaflets in northern Uganda to help tell the rebel fighters which routes to take, but added that this would only be done after consultations with the mediators, led by the southern Sudan government.

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