Ugandan rebels hit by cholera
2007-11-09 21:14
Nairobi - An outbreak of cholera has swept a camp housing Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army, infecting its leader Joseph Kony, his deputy Vincent Otti and scores of fighters, a spokesperson said on Friday.
The outbreak, caused by recent flooding and poor sanitation in the Sudan-Democratic Republic of Congo frontier hideout, was first reported in September, but details of fatalities remain unclear.
"They are in a healing process," LRA spokesperson Godfrey Ayoo told a press conference in Nairobi.
Scores of LRA fighters were seen on Thursday buying medicine in the border outpost of Nabanga, according to a top official from the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), which governs the semi-autonomous region of southern Sudan.
The United Nations has delivered medicine to the rebel hideouts, Ayoo said.
There were no reports of fatalities.
The 61-year-old Otti's whereabouts had been unknown since last month after rival LRA factions clashed over the line to adopt in peace talks with the Ugandan government aimed at ending two decades of insurgency.
Secret operations
Ayoo blamed Kampala for Wednesday's Ugandan press reports that Kony had killed his deputy, a day after a rebel delegation started consultations with local leaders and the public in the war-battered north, seeking to revive stuttering peace talks.
Southern Sudan authorities sent a team on Wednesday to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to look for Otti, while LRA top negotiator Martin Ojul denied the press reports.
In 2005, the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted five LRA leaders, including Kony and Otti, on a raft of charges such as murder, rape and enslavement of children.
Since the LRA took over a two-year-old rebellion in northern Uganda in 1988, its operations have been shrouded in secrecy, with Kony and Otti appearing in public for the first time in 2006.
Aid workers have said that disease outbreaks in rebel camps have contributed to depleting LRA ranks in the course of the conflict, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced up to 1.8 million people.