POLITICS-EAST AFRICA: Kampala And Khartoum Try To Mend Fences

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, May 27 1998 (IPS) - Uganda and Sudan, both long-time sworn enemies, have resorted to talks in an attempt to prevent a simmering tension between them from turning into a full-blown war and to patch up old wounds.

“I think both sides, although still suspicious of each other, are prepared to give peace a chance,” said Adam Karim, a political analyst in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

Karim, an independent researcher, said Wednesday that the tiff between the two neighbours “seems to have eased” following the “gesture of goodwill” by Sudan to release two Ugandan prisoners of war (POWs) on May 24.

“I think the return of the prisoners, in reciprocation to Uganda’s earlier similar move, offers a glimpse of hope to the volatile region,” he said.

Uganda handed over 42 Sudanese POWs to Khartoum last week. A total of 114 Sudanese soldiers were captured on Apr. 9 last year by Ugandan troops in southern Sudan, where Kampala claims Ugandan rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have bases.

“We are prepared to release the remaining 72 Sudanese … if Sudan will help free the remaining Ugandans in Southern Sudan,” said Amama Mbabazi, State Minister for Political Affairs in the President’s Office when receiving the two soldiers at Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport on May 24.

Top on the list of Uganda’s demands is the return of 21 school girls abducted on October 10, 1996 by the LRA, a rag-tag rebel army seeking to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni.

The LRA, headed by herbalist Joseph Kony, 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 LRA is dominated by people from the Acholi ethnic group, which straddles the Uganda-Sudan border. Its goal is to rule Uganda on the basis of the 10 Biblical commandments.

The Ugandan government has often charged that the LRA, like the West Nile Bank Front (WNBF), uses bases in Sudan as a springboard for raids into Uganda.

The WNBF is dominated by people from the West Nile Region — Madis, Lubgaras, Aringas and Nubians — who had formed the bulk of the army of ousted 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 the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire, from where they later infiltrated Uganda.

The Ugandan authorities also allege that the Islamic fundamentalist regime in the Sudan is backing the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group operating in western Uganda on the border with the DRC.

Countering that Uganda is supporting the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the Sudanese authorities say Khartoum — which spends 2.5 million US Dollars a day to finance the war in the south of the country, according to a recent estimate by SPLA leader Colonel John Garang — does not have the means nor the resources to help with foreign insurgency.

“We are a poor nation. We don’t have the resources to finance those kind of rebellions,” Ali al Haj, a top Sudanese official, who accompanied the POWs to Uganda told journalists in Entebbe at the weekend.

Colonel Ali Adam Nagi, the military attache at the Sudanese embassy in Kenya, said that so far, the two countries have made a start at better cooperation. “…The release of these two (Ugandans) is a sign of good cooperation and talks to improve relations will continue,” he was quoted as saying by Uganda’s state-owned ‘New Vision’ newspaper earlier this week.

To improve relations, Al Haj said Lt-Gen Omar Hassan al Bashir of Sudan was ready for “face-to-face talks” with Ugandan officials.

Bashir, who seized power in a military coup in 1989, is reported to have assured Uganda that Sudan was going to track down the girls — who are among 10,000 children and youths abducted by the rebels during the past three years — and return them to Uganda, probably in exchange for the remaining 72 Sudanese soldiers still held there.

Analysts here attribute the improved relations between Uganda and Sudan to the high-level trips — three so far — by Sudanese delegations to Uganda during the past five months. The delegations, led by Riak Machar, a former rebel commander who crossed over to the Sudanese government side, were despatched to mend fences.

“I think Machar has played a leading role in the release of the prisoners,” said a Sudanese refugee in Nairobi on Wednesday. “If backed by goodwill, the diplomatic shuttle will help ease the chilly relations between Sudan and Uganda.”

‘The New Vision’ agreed. “The exchanges, coming after intense diplomatic activity, indicate that many things are still possible. If Khartoum is to be taken seriously, it must build on the current efforts and prevail upon Kony’s rebels who have caused untold suffering on the people in the north, especially in Gulu and Kitgum,” the paper said in an editorial on May 25.

More than 300,000 people, mostly non-combatants, have been displaced by the conflict between the LRA and government troops in Gulu and Kitgum districts, on the border with the Sudan.

This is, however, not the first time that Uganda, which broke diplomatic relations with the Sudan in April 1995, has tried to mend fences with its giant neighbour.

Since then, similar efforts by Iran, Libya, Malawi and South Africa to mediate between the two have yielded no results.