According to a UN report released this week food security and access to healthcare, education and clean water continue to be dangerously low in the Karamoja region of Uganda. It forecasts that 700,000 Karamojong may need food aid through to the next harvest in July 2008, while over 10% of all civilians suffer from acute malnutrition. The report notes that the Ugandan military’s disarmament campaign continues to be linked to recent spikes in aggression and security incidents in the region, despite an alleged decrease in human rights abuses committed by the UPDF during the operations.

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The Ugandan military released a report today claiming that 54 civilians had been killed and 970 guns recovered during Karamoja disarmament operations in the first four months of the year. While reducing the rampant circulation and use of illegal small arms in the region should be an imperative for the Ugandan government, a wide variety of studies and sources (including those within the Ugandan government) indicate that the UPDF's forcible disarmament strategy is not the most appropriate way to do so.

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According to The New Vision, President Museveni has said the war in northern Uganda was primarily against the Sudanese government, not the LRA. "I hear people talking of 20 years of conflict with Kony. I don't want a narrow understanding of this affair. Our fight was not with Kony but with the Arabs of Khartoum who made a big mistake of underestimating us," Museveni said. "They (Sudanese) discovered that we were not the usual Black Africans. If you create problems for us we create more problems for you."

An official in south Sudan today accused LRA rebels of being responsible for looting machetes and abducting three people in Western Equatoria state. Witnesses in the region also said that a large group of LRA rebels was moving towards the Central African Republic. Read more at The Monitor.

After years of delays, the Ugandan government officially launched the Karamoja Integrated Disarmament and Development Plan (KIDDP) last week. The plan aims to integrate efforts to address chronic food insecurity, underdevelopment and violence stemming from the proliferation of small arms. It has undergone numerous revisions and delays, in part because in the past international donors have been reluctant to fund it due to concerns it focused too heavily on disarmament. The KIDDP is part of the larger umbrella of the Northern Uganda Peace, Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), a three-year $606 million initiative to rehabilitate conflict-affected regions in northern and eastern Uganda. Read more at allAfrica.com.

Also last week the UN and Ugandan government released a “joint factsheet” on Karamoja that includes key advocacy messages on addressing the region’s crises. The factsheet stresses that development and non-violent disarmament must be complimentary and calls for efforts to strengthen rule of law, increase access to basic services, ensure food and livelihood security and meet the UN Millennium Development Goals in Karamoja.

The Monitor claims it has seen a UN report with accounts of two former abductees who escaped the rebel camp in early April. The report says that LRA strength is 1,200 with almost half being new abductees undergoing military training. The report further said the LRA moved "to and from Central African Republic in two groups of about 300-500 people each together with families and that they all arrived back at their Garamba bases" in late March.

A Ugandan military spokesman today accused the LRA of being responsible for the abduction of 200 civilians in the DR Congo last month. These accusations come just one day after the chief mediator of Juba peace talks Reik Machar said that the rebel group had abducted 55 children in south Sudan in recent weeks. The LRA has terrorized communities throughout the region with abductions of innocent children and civilians for over a decade, but in past months verifying reports of and responsibility for abductions has proved difficult. If the latest reports are true, they raise further doubts about the commitment of the LRA and its leader Joseph Kony to the Juba peace process.