Row over fire and arrests of "rebels" in IDP camp

A row has broken out between the army and residents of Uganda's biggest Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) settlement, Pabbo camp, in the northern Gulu District, with the army claiming that the camp harbours rebel collaborators and the IDPs accusing the army of starting a fire which destroyed much of the camp during an operation to arrest suspects. Pabbo houses over 62,000 people fleeing Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) operations in northern Uganda. They are part of at least 1.2 million Ugandans who have been forced to take refuge in camps for fear of being attacked or abducted by the rebels. The army announced that it had recovered 800 rounds of ammunition and some uniforms after a raid on the camp mounted in the early hours of Monday morning. "We aren't actually going to arrest them - they are IDPs, where should we put them? But there is clear evidence of support for the rebels in that camp - 800 rounds of ammunition is a lot," the army spokesman, Maj Shaban Bantariza, told IRIN. But residents told the Acholi Religious Leaders' Peace Initiative (ARLPI) - a prominent local advocacy group based in Gulu town - that the claims that the army had found ammunition were a lie intended to divert attention from a fire that soldiers had started in the camp during a roundup of 6,000 people whom the army "suspects" of being collaborators. "The fire started on Sunday at 05:00 GMT, when soldiers started moving in zones F and D and ordering all male adults out of their huts," Father Carlos Rodriguez of the ARLPI told IRIN. "By midday, thousands of men were being kept in Pabbo market. That is when smoke rose as huts began to burn. The detainees asked the army to allow them to go and save their belongings, but the soldiers refused. Some men then began running away and soldiers threw stones at them," he said. The army denies the accusation. "For all we know, the fire could be a smokescreen for these rebel collaborators to distract attention from their own clear support for the rebels," he said. The war in northern Uganda between the army and the LRA has lasted 18 years. The rebels, a brutal, shadowy group, claim they want to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni and replace it with one based on the Biblical Ten Commandments. Museveni has asked the Intentional Criminal Court to investigate the rebels.