Waging Peace:  Uganda

Mediating Conflict

Since the mid-1980s, the government of Uganda has been fighting the Lord's Resistance Army, a quasi-spiritual Ugandan rebel group that has had bases in Southern Sudan. The LRA has kept northern Uganda in a state of almost continuous insecurity and has attracted particular attention due to its use of child soldiers, kidnapped from their homes in northern Uganda and forced to fight, often against their relatives and neighbors. Additionally, the LRA contributed to hostilities between the government of Uganda and the government of Sudan, leading to the severing of diplomatic relations in 1995.

In 1999, President Carter and the Conflict Resolution Program negotiated the Nairobi Agreement between Sudan and Uganda, in which both sides committed to stop supporting forces against each other's government and agreed to eventually re-establish full diplomatic relations between them, opening the door for improved regional peacemaking. Following the signing of the Nairobi Agreement, the Conflict Resolution Program engaged intensively to ensure its implementation, convening a multitude of ministerial and security meetings between the two governments and other interested parties and making strenuous efforts to initiate dialogue between the LRA and the government of Uganda. Full diplomatic relations have since been restored between the two countries, and Uganda became a key regional partner in pushing for a peaceful resolution to Sudan's civil war. Read full text >

Waging Peace in the Great Lakes

Following the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the presidents of Uganda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) asked President Carter to facilitate a meeting between themselves and the presidents of Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania – countries collectively known as the Great Lakes region of Africa – to negotiate a regional initiative to combat the climate of genocide, repatriate 1.7 million Rwandan refugees, and curb violence in the region. President Carter was joined in this effort by former Tanzania President Julius Nyerere, former Mali President Amadou Touré, and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

After summits in Cairo and Tunis in March 1996, the presidents agreed to:

1. Prevent cross-border raids into any country
2. Halt arms flow to rebel groups
3. Remove people stirring fears that it is unsafe to return to Rwanda from refugee camps
4. Return military equipment to its country of origin, including Rwandan equipment held in Zaire
5. Turn over individuals indicted for genocide crimes to the International Tribunal for Rwanda and
6. Allow some 300 human rights observers in Rwanda to work with returning refugees.

However, despite these important commitments and strenuous efforts to implement them, there was little support from the international community, and most refugees finally returned to Rwanda only when full-scale violence broke out in Zaire.