Ugandan President Museveni has called on the US to facilitate Uganda, the DR Congo, Sudan and the UN to agree on a joint hunt for LRA chief Joseph Kony, who is said to be camped in Garamba National Park. Museveni said while the UPDF had the capacity to repulse any attacks, the problem was having LRA rebels "staying freely in Congo." Read more at The New Vision.

The elite unit of the Congolese army (FARDC), that was sent to disarm the LRA in Garamba National Park, has instead turned against the Ugandan army (UPDF), accusing it of infiltration into its territory. "Our enemy is UPDF," said Capt. John Peter Molengo. "We are gathering evidence of UPDF infiltration and handing it to the UN." The commando battalion has deployed along the Congo-Sudan border, to fight any incursions by UPDF and the SPLA, contrary to their original mission of fighting the LRA inside the Garamba National Park. "On April 26, we killed two Ugandan soldiers, injured several others and captured some of their ammunition when a group of 300 crossed into Lagabe," Molengo said.

While displaying strong hostile feelings against Uganda, the FARDC commanders in Aba talk with great excitement about the four meetings they had with the Ugandan rebels, including two encounters with the rebels’ second-in-command, Vincent Otti. Footage of the meeting shows the LRA delegation, led by Col. Tabu Makosa, explaining that they have come to Congo to take a rest and prepare to continue the fight against President Yoweri Museveni. Read more at The New Vision.

The founders of the Toronto-based group GuluWalk have announced that over 100 cities are planning to participate in the 2006 global GuluWalk Day on October 21st of this year. This year's event will be a significant scaling up from last year's October GuluWalk Day, in which 40 cities participated - a sign that the international community is increasingly aware of and unwilling to tolerate the crisis in northern Uganda. GuluWalk founders Adrian Bradbury and Kieran Hayward visited northern Uganda with Uganda-CAN founders Peter Quaranto and Michael Poffenberger in March of this year. Read more at GuluWalk.com and The Monitor.

MONUC, the UN peacekeeping mission in the DR Congo, has withdrawn its forces from Aba, the town closest to Garamba National Park. Garamba has harbored LRA forces for over seven months. A spokesman for MONUC said that verification missions have been unable to ascertain that there are LRA rebels in the region, and maintained that ongoing UN investigations have not confirmed media reports that the eight MONUC peacekeepers killed in Garamba in January died at the hands of the LRA. Read more at The New Vision.

A report issued by Refugees International (RI) calls attention to the intensification of LRA activity in southern Sudan, which it says is “impeding humanitarian access, slowing the ability of refugees and displaced people to return home, and causing new displacement and refugee outflows.”

The report recommends that the UN expand the mandate of the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) to include the protection of civilians from the LRA. UNMIS’s present mandate only includes overseeing the implementation of a peace deal between the central Sudanese government and the SPLM that recently ended decades of civil war in southern Sudan. Efforts to rebuild the region are being severely undercut by LRA activity. Read more at The Sudan Tribune.

The top U.S. diplomat in Africa said on Tuesday that Washington wanted to get rid of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels by the end of this year. Speaking at the Chatham House think-tank in London, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer said the LRA rebels needed to be stopped, and this meant capturing their leaders soon. "Certainly it's going to be a priority of President Bush's administration to get rid of the LRA before the end of this year," Frazer said. Frazer further said getting rid of the LRA leaders was a crucial part of a three-pronged strategy to end the conflict in northern Uganda, as the rebel movement should then wane. The two other elements were to urge the Ugandan government to reconcile with the Acholi community in the north of the country and to get support for the people displaced by the war. Read more at The Washington Post.

The European Union Council on Monday issued a statement demanding that Uganda and neighboring countries arrest LRA leader Joseph Kony and four other LRA commanders who were indicted by the International Criminal Court last October. The statement emphasized the regional nature of the conflict and its disruption of peace and rebuilding efforts in the DR Congo, southern Sudan, and northern Uganda. Read more at Africa News Dimension.

Also, Uganda yesterday renewed its calls to have a UN envoy appointed to coordinate a regional approach to ending the LRA rebellion. Uganda's outgoing Minister of State for International Affairs, Mr. Henry Okello Oryem, said that such a move would speed up efforts to end the war and defuse tensions caused by allegations from the UN and the DR Congo that Ugandan troops unilaterally entered the DR Congo on April 26th to pursue LRA rebels. Read more at AllAfrica.com.

The UN has released a revised version of the 2006 Common Humanitarian Action Plan (CHAP) and Consolidated Appeal (CAP) for Uganda. The documents note that there is a "growing consensus among the humanitarian community in Uganda that the past efforts to enhance protection activities and relief assistance in camps for the internally displaced have not achieved sufficient impact." They call for a strategy that stresses coordinated humanitarian responses and enhanced freedom of movement for IDPs and people returning to their homes, and for the appropriation of $262,501,275 to carry out these objectives. Read more at ReliefWeb.

Uganda's Defence Minister Amama Mbabazi yesterday announced that the Ugandan government is trying to mobilize a regional military response to disarm the LRA and serve arrest warrants for its leaders from the International Criminal Court. He proposed that the militaries of Uganda, southern Sudan, the DR Congo and UN peacekeepers in southern Sudan and the DR Congo cooperate to end the LRA rebellion. The international community and DR Congo have been reluctant to allow the Ugandan military to enter the DR Congo to pursue the LRA because of their involvement in perpetuating the DR Congo's simmering civil conflicts. Read more at The New Vision.

This week Uganda-CAN co-founder Michael Poffenberger was quoted in the US News and World Report on the disparity between international attention and resources focused on the humanitarian crises in Darfur and northern Uganda, saying "Certain crises are in style and others are not, regardless of the number of people dying or the scale of the disaster." In FY 2005 the US government spent over $500 million in humanitarian assistance to Darfur and bordering eastern Chad, while spending only $67 million in humanitarian assistance to northern Uganda.

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The new US ambassador to Uganda, Steven Browning, has made his second visit to war-torn northern Uganda. "This trip underscores the priority that the American government places on helping to resolve the conflict in the north," Alyson Grunder, the embassy's public affairs officer, said. Please write and thank Ambassador Browning for his concern and leadership for peace. Read more at The New Vision.

Uganda-CAN co-founder Michael Poffenberger is quoted in a new article by US News and World Report on the world's neglect toward the crisis in northern Uganda. Read the article here.

On 28 April 2006, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1674 on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, the first resolution on this subject in over five years. Resolution 1674 contains the historic first official Security Council reference to the responsibility to protect: it "reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity." This has great relevance to the crisis in northern Uganda and the world's responsibility to act. Read the full resolution here.

Members of the U.S. Congress plan to introduce a Bill to deny U.S. military assistance to Uganda and six other countries believed to use child soldiers. Along with denunciations of the LRA as "a barbaric cult," the U.S. Congress heard sharp criticisms last week of the Ugandan government’s alleged failure to pursue peace negotiations with the LRA and to prevent the deaths of thousands of displaced civilians. Congressman Chris Smith, chairman of the US House of Representatives’ Africa subcommittee, set the tone for the April 26 inquiry by suggesting that the government is "insufficiently committed to improving the situation in northern Uganda."

At the hearing, a USAID official endorsed the findings of a study last year indicating that there are more than 900 excess deaths per week in IDP camps. "Even when compared with other humanitarian emergencies, northern Uganda’s camps are woefully deficient in the provision of water for drinking and bathing, latrines for adequate sanitation, and basic living space for physical and mental well-being," said Leonard Rogers, a USAid deputy assistant administrator. Read more at The East African.