Uganda's amnesty team to receive LRA rebels

Uganda's Amnesty Commission has assembled a special project to receive and resettle rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) as soon as a peace agreement is signed.

Commissioner in charge of West Nile, Al hajji Ganyana Miiro, was quoted by New Vision on Saturday as saying the project involves opening up reception camps in southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and northern Uganda and a satellite office in Juba.

"We shall establish reception camps at Nabanga in DRC, Owiny- Kibul in southern Sudan and others in Gulu, Kitgum and in Lira (in northern Uganda)," Miiro said.

He said the combatants would undergo a brief sensitization training highlighting current economic, political, health and social situation of the country.

"We shall ensure security at the camps besides providing adequate medicine, water, food and shelter," he said, adding that medical personnel would be in place at each camp to take care of traumatized returnees.

Miiro said though the project's basic framework had been finalized, it had not been presented to a donor working group because of uncertainty of the actual number of LRA fighters.

"How many fighters are there is anybody's guess. Some puts it as low as 300 combatants and the others as high as 3,000 and yet this is a key input into this project," he said.

The government and LRA rebels are engaged in the peace talks in Juba, southern Sudan, to bring an end to the conflict of nearly two decades in northern Uganda which has left tens of thousands of people dead and over 1.4 million others displaced.

The talks, which started on July 14 under the mediation of southern Sudan, are seen as another chance to end the conflict in northern Uganda, one of Africa's longest conflicts, after a dozen of such attempts failed in the last few years.

Source: Xinhua