Uganda will allow visits to old displaced camps

Uganda plans to open up to visitors former camps where rebel fighters slaughtered displaced civilians, a senior tourism official said on Tuesday. Hundreds of civilians were killed in northern Uganda during a long-running insurgency by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a group notorious for its extreme brutality. "The idea behind it is to document what happened, to teach visitors about what the people there went through, and to help them to live in peace now," said Grace Aulo, the tourism development commissioner. One of the proposed tourist sites is Barlonyo camp, where LRA rebels butchered around 330 people on a single afternoon in 2004, one of the worst massacres of the insurgency. "This history was dark but people need to be able to see what happened back then," Aulo told AFP. Almost two million people were forced into a vast network of camps during two decades of conflict between the government and rebels. The camps were closed in 2009 after the Ugandan military pushed the LRA into neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, where the group remains active. Aulo said work had started to designate the former displaced people's camps as official tourism sites, but could not say when they would open to the public. Authorities hope to attract visitors from both Uganda and abroad, she said. The LRA has killed nearly 2,400 people and abducted 3,400 across northeast DR Congo, Central African Republic and southern Sudan since the Ugandan army launched a military offensive against the group in 2008, according to Human Rights Watch. However, the New York-based rights watchdog has also accused the Ugandan army of widespread abuses against civilians during the conflict, including unlawful killings and torture.