Ugandan rebels killed more than 470 Sudanese civilians, raping and abducting girls and women and burning down six villages in a week of violence, the Roman Catholic Church in southern Sudan charged in a statement received by AFP on Saturday.
Insurgents of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) committed the alleged atrocities as they escaped an offensive by Ugandan troops, the church's diocese of Torit in the southern part of Sudan said in the statement, dated Thursday.
The killings were carried out in several villages along the Imotong mountain range in the Eastern Equatoria region of southern Sudan, the statement said, adding that another 500 people had fled their homes in the area.
In addition, the rebels torched six villages as they were fleeing a raid by the Uganda Peoples' Defense Forces on their bases in the southern Sudan town of Katire, the statement said.
It named the burned villages as Idiefe, Obeyok, Kubaya, Lotele, Lohui and Isuhak.
Torit Bishop Akio Johnson Mutek appealed to the international community "to come to the aid of these destitute people who are forced to desert their villages as they had just begun cultivating their crops," the statement said.
Kampala and Khartoum signed an agreement in March allowing Ugandan troops to carry out search-and-destroy operations against the LRA rebels, who launch cross-border raids from rear bases in southern Sudan.
"Bishop Akio fears that if the situation continues unabated many civil populations who are currently scattered in the bushes might become vulnerable to all kind of dangers and diseases," the statement added.
Meanwhile, in a separate statement dated Friday, the church said that the LRA had raided three villages in the Magwi county of the same Eastern Equatoria area on Wednesday.
The rebels killed an unknown number of men and stripped naked girls and forced them to drink their own urine before raping them and taking them away.
"The LRA raided the three villages around Lokodi at 5.00 p.m on May 8th, and separated females and males," the statement quoted local priest Leon Buga, who works with displaced people in the area, as saying.
"The men and boys were all brutally killed publicly whereas young girls between the ages of five and 16 were defiled before their parents," the priest added.
The LRA, which launched its insurgency in 1988, says it wants to oust the government of President Yoweri Museveni and replace it with an administration based on the Ten Commandments of the Bible.
The group is, however, better known for its brutality against civilians in northern Uganda.
Southern Sudan is already mixed up in a longstanding civil war pitting the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) against successive regimes in Khartoum.
The SPLA aims to put an end to the domination of Sudan's mainly black and Christian or animist south by the largely Islamic Arabized north.
Since Ugandan forces launched their "Operation Iron Fist" against the LRA in southern Sudan, they have reported overrunning a number of rebel bases, capturing a large amount of arms and forcing the insurgents to flee southwards to the mountainous terrain close to the border.
Kampala previously accused the Sudanese government of supporting the LRA, however Sudan denied the charges and accused Uganda of supporting the SPLA.
Ties between the two neighboring countries have recently improved and both countries agreed late last month to re-establish diplomatic relations severed seven years ago amidst the mutual recriminations over support for each other's insurgencies. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
