Ultimate Media
The government of Uganda has dismissed conclusions by the Human Rights Watch that Uganda still faces a security threat from the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels who the internal human rights body said are on rampage killing civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Human Rights Watch in a report last week said the LRA killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others, including at least 80 children, during a previously unreported four-day rampage in the Makombo area of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2009.
Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch says the four-day rampage the LRA carried out demonstrates that the LRA remains a serious threat to civilians and is not a spent force, as the Ugandan and Congolese governments claim.
But the Minister of Defence, Dr. Crispus Kiyonga has said the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and their leader Joseph Kony will never return to disrupt peace in Uganda.
Kiyonga says Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) together with their counterparts of Sudan and Democratic Republic Congo has chased LRA rebels from Sudan and DRC.
Kony refused to sign a peace agreement with the government of Uganda saying he will only sign after indictments by the International Criminal Court against him and three of his top aides are lifted. The ICC insists he must be arrested to answer crimes against humanity, although local leaders in northern Uganda have been strongly calling for the rebels to be forgiven under their traditional justice system, mato Oput.