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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
UGANDA: Army claims significant victory over rebels
KAMPALA, 22 January 2004 (IRIN) - The Ugandan army has hailed the killing of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) overall army commander, Yadin Tolbert Nyeko, as "one of the most significant victories against the LRA since the launch of Operation Iron Fist" in 2001.
"This guy was army commander, so this is a big defeat for them. There are now only two above him – Vincent Otti and [Joseph] Kony himself. It weakens their morale. That's why they fought so hard to get his body back from us, but we repelled them," the spokesman of the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF), Maj Shaban Bantariza, told IRIN on Wednesday.
Bantariza said Nyeko had been killed at around midday on Monday in a battle involving a couple of UPDF battalions backed by air power. Nyeko's fighters, he added, had attempted to retrieve his body from the army, but failed.
Local press reports, which showed pictures of the dead commander on Wednesday, said he had been killed in Nwoya county, west of Kitgum.
But peace groups and religious leaders operating in the north warned that the situation remained unpredictable. Archbishop John Baptist Odama, the head of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative, told IRIN that talk of victories over LRA commanders was futile so long as the LRA continued to kill and maim civilians.
"The LRA presence in the north is still strong," he said. "They are still killing people in Lira, so I don’t know what the UPDF thinks it is doing claiming they have nearly defeated them."
Odama said "propaganda" about winning the war against the LRA was "dangerous", because it created the impression that the north was now safe, which it wasn't.
Bantariza told IRIN that the LRA had lost a central pillar in its command structure. "They can’t easily replace him – there are few equivalents in the LRA commanding his kind of authority. Even the divisional commanders will now be thrown into disarray."
He said all that remained to be done was to pursue Kony and Otti to their hide-outs in Sudan. "The important thing will be not to give the LRA time to regroup in Sudan."
But Odama said: "We are dealing with the lives of people; they shouldn’t be politicised in this fashion to suit government propaganda. If people are still killing and being killed, this is not what we call success." He was referring to the killing of 17 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in a camp in Lira District by LRA fighters last week.
Bantariza admitted that the north was not yet safe. "There are still pockets of LRA activity," he said, "but our commanders are pursuing them. Yesterday [Tuesday] we killed three [rebels] and another four surrendered."
Bantariza told IRIN that the IDP camps in the north were being protected by Local Defence Units (LDUs), not the UPDF. He added that the army was in the process of training more LDUs for Lira District. "They’ll be passed out shortly; then the camps will be as safe as Gulu," he said.
The LRA, a brutal, shadowy rebel group which the government says is based in neighbouring Sudan, has waged a guerrilla war in northern Uganda against the government of President Yoweri Museveni for 17 years. Led by Kony, the group claims it wants to topple Museveni and replace his government with one based on the biblical ten commandments.
Theme(s): (IRIN) Conflict
[ENDS]
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