Ugandan LRA rebels violate truce - monitors

KAMPALA, Oct 13 (Reuters) Ugandan rebels have violated a truce with the government by leaving an agreed assembly point, the head of an independent monitoring team said today, in a blow to efforts to end one of Africa's longest conflicts.

Despite hopes that the truce signed in August would help end the Lord's Resistance Army's (LRA) two-decade insurgency, government and rebel counter-accusations in the past few weeks have shaken the early optimism.

''We did not find them there ... Because they were supposed to be there, it is automatically a violation,'' Major-General Wilson Deng Kuoirot told Reuters.

He said monitors found 45 Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in the Owiny-Ki-Bul assembly point on the Sudan-Uganda border compared with 800 reported last month.

An LRA leader confirmed the departure but said his fighters had not gone far.

''That is true. They are within Owiny-Ki-Bul but not exactly the assembly place. They have left because the army has surrounded us,'' Vincent Otti, the LRA's deputy leader, told Reuters by satellite phone from his bush hideout.

Otti demanded the Ugandan army leave.

Kuoirot said claims by the LRA, one of Africa's most feared rebel groups, that the area had been ringed by Ugandan UPDF army forces were unfounded: ''There is no evidence of UPDF deployment around Owiny-Ki-Bul.'' Kampala has claimed the LRA has broken the truce and the LRA has accused Ugandan soldiers of encircling fighters assembled at one of two locations under the agreement, raising doubts over the future of the peace process.

The LRA's war has killed tens of thousands and forced almost 2 million people into squalid camps in northern Uganda.

Riek Machar, chief mediator of peace talks between the two sides in neighbouring southern Sudan, will decide on any response to the truce violation, Kuoirot said.

Mediators said last month the LRA had missed a September 19 deadline to assemble. They initially said 800 LRA insurgents had gathered in the agreed areas, though many including leader Joseph Kony and Otti remained at large.

Otti has repeatedly said he would not leave his bush hideout unless the International Criminal Court (ICC) dropped war crimes indictments against him, Kony and three other commanders.

A spokesman for the government negotiators said yesterday Uganda would try to push the ICC to drop the warrants only after the LRA signed a peace deal.

President Yoweri Museveni has dangled a promise not to hand the wanted men over to the ICC to spur the talks along.

REUTERS SP RK1712