Since the signing of a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army in 2006, about two thirds of the 1.8 million IDPs who lived in camps at the height of the crisis have returned to their areas of origin. However, much work remains to be done to ensure that these returns are sustainable. Basic infrastructure and services in the return areas are inadequate or non-existent.

Four journalists from Uganda's largest independent newspaper are facing criminal prosecutions, joining four others already charged since 2007, according to local journalists and news reports. Criminal prosecutions against the Monitor are on the rise against the backdrop of mounting national tensions in the lead-up to general elections in 2011. This month, President Yoweri Museveni, who is expected to seek re-election, warned private broadcasters against inciting public discontent with the government.

Concerned by President Yoweri Museveni’s comments on the ‘Bafuruki’ (‘immigrants’), Vincent Nuwagaba questions the assumptions around identity held by Uganda’s premier, calling for greater solidarity and mutual respect between the country’s groups, regardless of origin.

Marina Sharpe reviews Chris Dolan’s . Commending Dolan’s counter narrative to the standard, short-sighted characterisation of the conflict enveloping northern Uganda, Sharpe applauds the author’s success in sensitively capturing the experiences and suffering of the north’s Acholi people.

The government is investigating whether a nationwide shortage of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs led to the reported deaths of HIV-positive people in northern Uganda this month. Health workers in Apac district reported that at least 17 people known to have been HIV-positive died over the past month after failing to receive their life-prolonging medication due to supply shortfalls.

Some 12,500 people in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been uprooted from their homes in the past month by attacks by the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the United Nations refugee agency has reported. “The humanitarian situation in this remote part of the DRC remains dramatic,” Andrej Mahecic, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters in Geneva.

Following his ordeal both at the hands of the Ugandan police and in a local mental health hospital, human rights activist Vincent Nuwagaba shares with Pambazuka News why Uganda’s dysfunctional institutions must be reformed. Institutions that are ‘meant to protect and preserve life’ have been turned into ‘a killing machinery’ says Nuwagaba. Charging President Museveni with deliberately destroying the country’s institutions to serve his own interests and increase his power, Nuwagaba says regime change is needed before reforms can be made. ‘It is high time we realised that we are citizens and not subjects,’ says Nuwagaba, ‘and hence demand to be governed in a humane, convivial and dignified manner.’

A year ago, a mother in Kashari County took the law into her own hands and castrated a man she caught raping her seven-year-old daughter. Malita Kyomugisha returned from her farm and found her neighbor Tito Mugarura sexually assaulting her youngest daughter behind her house in Rugyerera village.

Bushenyi district might lose a donation of over 500 computers if the Government goes ahead to implement a ban on the importation of used computers. While presenting this year's budget recently, Syda Bbumba, the finance minister, announced a total ban on the importation of used computers, freezers and refrigerators, citing environmental concerns.

The Ugandan government should urgently charge or release five detainees held by military intelligence, one of them for 16 months, Human Rights Watch has said. Lawyers for the detainees' families and friends filed petitions for habeas corpus with the High Court in Kampala on July 17, 2009 seeking to compel the government to justify the legal basis for continuing detention.

Circumcising men who already have HIV does not protect their female partners from the virus, a study in Uganda has found. Circumcision is known to protect men from acquiring HIV. But the research, from the Lancet, showed no benefit in those who already had the virus and was stopped early because of the continued risk to women.

A week after giving birth to her sixth child, Christine Achan walked 60 km (37 miles) from her village in northern Uganda to get life-saving anti-retroviral drugs to stop her and her baby becoming sick with Aids. Doctors say it is villagers like her that the results of Africa's largest and longest running clinical test, the Dart trial, should help.

Nearly ten years ago, the government of Uganda established the Universal Primary Education Program, designed to boost classroom attendance and increase literacy and education rates throughout the country. In less than a decade, the policy generated dramatic results, more than doubling the number of students enrolled in primary schools from 2.9 million to 6.3 million children.

Rwanda's post-conflict recovery has a number of impressive signposts. One is the economy, which grew at an annual rate of about 11 percent last year, according to the country's national bank. Another is the political empowerment of its women. In 2008, Rwanda elected the world's first majority-female parliament and today a woman leads the country's Supreme Court. One third of the cabinet of President Paul Kagame is female.

cc After years of seeing President Yoweri Museveni rewrite the constitution to run for yet another term, some Ugandans simply want Barack Obama to ‘denounce dictatorship’, writes Beth Tuckey. But given that Uganda is one of the US’s most important allies despite Museveni’s poor credentials as a ‘responsible democratic leader’, Tuckey asks how easy it would be for Obama to change the nature of the relationship between the two countries.

A stringent Bill against homosexuality is in the offing, the state minister for ethics and integrity, Dr. James Nsaba Buturo, has said. Addressing a press conference at the Media Centre, Buturo said the country was besieged by homosexuality, pornography, prostitution, human sacrifice, drug abuse, embezzlement and witchcraft to the extent that it was “dangerously becoming a permissive society.”

Uganda will pass a law banning female genital mutilation, which is rampant among pastoralist tribes in the country's eastern region, the president said in a statement on Friday. "The way God made it, there is no part of a human body that is useless," President Yoweri Museveni told a gathering in the eastern Karamoja district.

The government has issued a stern warning to homosexuals and their sympathisers, saying it will not accept practice of unnatural sex even if it means losing out on the much needed donor support. The Minister of Ethics and Integrity, Dr Nsaba Buturo, told journalists at the Uganda Media Centre yesterday that they are ready to forfeit any amount of donor funding that is tagged as a condition to accept homosexuality.

Efforts to guard Uganda against looming food insecurity are held back by government’s failure to encourage and sensitize farmers on what specific fertilizer types to use in order to rejuvenate the increasingly less fruitful soils. Scientists warn that despite availability of some improved seed varieties, soils in the landlocked East African country can no longer produce food sustainably to feed a rapidly growing population.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a statement by the Washington-based Africa Faith and Justice Network, a participant in the coalition lobby effort for the billin the UC Congress, but an outspoken opponent of the military option; the full statement from the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative; an open letter from Resolve Uganda stressing the need for U.S. support for reconstruction; and additional references to recent analytical background material from the Enough Project, Conciliation Resources (London), Institute for Security Studies (Pretoria), and Ronald Atkinson's two-part series in the Independent.