When Sudan accused UPDF of fighting alongside SPLA

Twenty eight years ago, the government of Sudan accused the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF) of fighting alongside rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A).
Sudan accused Uganda in a statement issued in Khartoum on October 29, 1995, of having attacked Parjok and Teit. The accusation was made four days after SPLA forces launched a major offensive against government forces and captured large swaths of territory in the Blue Nile Province and other parts of south Sudan.

The SPLA offensive was launched two months after the collapse of a ceasefire agreement that the government had signed with the rebel force in March the same year.
Uganda, which was accused along Eritrea and Ethiopia, denied the accusations .

Genesis
However, the accusations came several months after Uganda had severed diplomatic ties with Sudan and scaled down communication with the National Islamic Front dominated government.
The severance on April 22, 1995, of ties between the two countries came at the height of mutual suspicions precipitated by accusations that they were each aiding the other’s rebels.

Uganda accused Sudan of aiding the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of Joseph Kony, which was at the time operating from bases in in southern Sudan. They were believed to have been enjoying the support of the government of Sudan. From the said bases, the LRA would launch operations that would result in mass killings, torture, rape, and also abduct children for conscription into their ranks.

It also often targeted trade and international humanitarian convoys.
The LRA was founded in 1989. It succeeded Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement (HSM), which was annihilated by the National Resistance Army (NRA) in October 1988.
Whereas the LRA sought to overthrow the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government and replace it with a regime that would implement policies based on its own brand of Christianity, it did not pose an immediate threat to the government. It only destabilised parts of northern Uganda.

Embassy raids
The immediate cause of the decision by Uganda to sever ties with Sudan was the alleged refusal by Sudanese diplomats in Kampala to hand over arms believed to have been in their possession.
The Sudan News Agency (SANA) reported on April 21 that Uganda security agencies had raided the home of the military attaché. They did not enter the premises though.

“The Ugandan authorities… ordered the Ugandan security forces to beat up and fire at members of the embassy. After this they laid siege to the office of the military attaché, in a flagrant violation of the Vienna agreement on diplomatic relations,” it reported.
Kenya News Agency reported that Ugandan security forces had hours before the raid ordered a number of diplomats to leave Uganda.

“On April 21, Uganda served notice of expulsion on 11 diplomats in the Sudanese embassy in Kampala, giving four of them 48 hours to leave the country and the remainder 14 days. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the measure was aimed at equalising the two countries’ diplomatic representation in Kampala and Khartoum. Neither embassy will have more than five officials,” the agency noted.

First Secretary Hassan Muhammad al-Tom; Military Attach Lt-Col Haidar al-Hadi Hajj Omar; and administrative attaches Adam Muhammad Abd al-Hadi Adam and Badr ad-Din Hussein Riziq Hussein were required to leave within 48 hours.
Seven others, Mu’tasim al-Amin Muhammad al- Hassan; Awad Taha al-Tom Taha; Press Attaché Hassan al-Umdah; Abdallah al-Badr al-Bari; First Secretary Security Khalid Mahmud Hamad; and Abdallah Abd al-Karim Abdallah, were to leave within 14 days.

“The two countries are undoing the pledge made by Sudan’s vice president Zubeir Muhammad Salih, and Uganda’s deputy prime minister Eriya Kategaya to normalise their relations,” KNA noted.
The raid and subsequent expulsion of diplomats came after LRA rebels raided and massacred 155 people in Atiak Trading Centre in Kilak County, Gulu District, in what Tanzania’s High Commissioner to Uganda, Mr Joshua Opanga, described as “a tragedy of unimaginable proportions”.

Restoration of ties
Diplomatic ties between the two countries were restored in September 1996 following mediation by Iranian president Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was on a six nation tour of Africa. 

“The Foreign ministers of Uganda and Sudan signed an agreement in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum on Monday, normalising relations after a 17 months break in diplomatic ties,” Sana reported on September 9, 1996.
The Iranian president had spent four days in Uganda and two in Sudan from where he flew to Tanzania. His visit came at a time when Iran was coming under increasing pressure following the imposition by the United States and other Western countries of sanctions against Iran.

More hostilities
The restoration of diplomatic ties did not translate into an end to trading of accusations.
Maj Gen Salim Saleh, who was the President’s military advisor on northern Uganda, said Sudanese planes, an Antonov 26 bomber and two MiG fighter jets had dropped bombs on Moyo, leaving one woman dead. Sudan denied the accusations.
“The Ugandan claim could be a cover for Ugandan military escalation against Sudan as had happened in previous cases,” Sudan’s minister for Culture and Information, Tayeb Ibrahim, said in a televised statement in Khartoum.

In March 1997, Sudan accused the UPDF of having made incursions into Kaya and Bazi, south-west of Juba. The government spokesperson, Mr Ibrahim, claimed that the UPDF had used a big number of tanks and heavy artillery. Sudan, he said, reserved the right to retaliate.

Cooperation
For a while it looked like the two countries were headed for war, but from around 2001 they engaged in talks on improving relations and on how best to deal with the LRA problem.
Those talks culminated in the signing of several protocols, including the 2002 military protocol that paved way for the UPDF to enter and operate in South Sudan and put pressure on the LRA. The UPDF started pursuing the LRA in Soudan in March 2004.

That partially contributed to the decision by the rebel force – which killed thousands of civilians and displaced more than 1.5 million people – to pursue peace before they relocated to Congo and later the Central African Republic. It culminated in the end of the war in northern Uganda. Some good could after all have come from those accusations.
So good had relations between the two countries become that by May 2004 Uganda could leap to Sudan’s defence when fresh accusations that it was still aiding the LRA came up.

“It is a known fact that the LRA and its leader Joseph Kony has for over the years been living and operating from the Sudan and the government of Uganda and the government of Sudan have since the restoration of the diplomatic relations in 2001 been engaged in diplomatic talks on improving relations between the two countries and on how best to deal with the LRA problem,” read a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kampala on May 4, 2004.
Some good could after all have come out of the accusation 28 years ago that the UPDF was fighting alongside the SPLA.