UGANDA-POPULATION: Rebels Warn Sudanese Refugees To Vacate Camps

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Nov 14 1996 (IPS) - As the international community prepares to assist masses of refugees displaced by fighting in eastern Zaire, another group of refugees are under threat, this time in Uganda.

Rebels seeking to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni have warned thousands of Sudanese refugees living in the East African country to vacate their camps or face attacks.

Wendy Rappeport of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was quoted by a leading newspaper in Uganda as confirming that rebels of the West Nile Bank Front (WNBF) made the threat when they attacked a refugee camp at Invepi on Friday last.

The camp, home to some 9,300 Sudanese refugees, is around 60 kilometres from the town of Arua, which is on the border with Sudan.

The UNHCR lost radio equipment and two vehicles — burnt by the rebels as they withdrew — during the attack. No one was killed.

A Sudanese refugee who arrived here from Arua this week said: “The refugees and aid workers at Invepi have been badly shaken by the incident.” However, he said no one had left the camp.

The refugee, who refused to be named for fear of reprisals, told IPS that the WNBF was stepping up its activity in the West Nile region, which hosts most of the more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees in Uganda.

The WNBF is dominated by people from the West Nile region — Madis, Lugbaras, Aringas and Nubians — who had formed the bulk of the army of ousted Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. The group’s leader, Col. Juma Oris, was himself a senior official in Amin’s regime.

After Amin’s ouster in 1979, many of his henchmen fled to neighbouring countries, mainly Sudan and Zaire, from where they later infiltrated Uganda.

The WBNF made headlines in May when a group of 300 rebels who had entered Uganda from southern Sudan raided an army barracks in the town of Koboko, blew up part of a bridge and ambushed a Red Cross truck.

Koboko, Amin’s birth place, is a remote town some 600 kilometres northwest of the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

The WBNF, said to be backed by Sudan, has staged a number of raids against camps holding people displaced by the 13-year war between Khartoum and rebels fighting for self-determination for Southern Sudan.

These attacks include two on Palorinya, a camp on the border with Sudan, on Oct. 16 and 18 in which 16 refugees were killed, according to the UNHCR. Because of the insecurity, some refugees are said to be moving into the interior of Uganda, to places where there is no rebel activity.

Last week, 47 Sudanese orphans aged between 13 and 16 were flown from West Nile to Kyatiri — a district in the Western region, which does not border on Sudan — aboard an 11-seater aircraft chartered by UNHCR.

The chidren, who were flown in five trips, were accompanied by Sudanese Catholic Bishop Paride Taban and Rence Cujpers of the UNHCR office in Kampala.

Paride said the orphans were Nuba, an ethnic group that lives in northern Sudan and some of whose members have joined the southern Sudanese rebels fighting the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum. The bishop said the children had been removed from West Nile because Sudanese fighter planes had been bombing the region.

What also worries the refugees is the alliance between the WNBF and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), another rebel group that operates in the north of Uganda. The LRA, headed by herbalist Joseph Kony, killed more than 100 Sudanese when it attacked a refugee camp at Acholi Pii in northern Uganda in July.

The LRA began its fight against Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) government in 1987, shortly after the defeat of a rebellion by the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Kony’s cousin Alice Lakwena.

The Ugandan government has often charged that the LRA — whose goal is to rule Uganda on the basis of the 10 biblical commandments — as well as the WNBF use bases in Sudan as a springboard for raids into Uganda.

The Sudanese authorities counter that Uganda is supporting the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which temporarily drove the Ugandan insurgents from refugee camps in southern Sudan in the 1980s.