UGANDA: Uganda's government has signed a truce with the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), raising hopes of an end to the country's 19-year-old civil war.
Thousands of people have been killed or mutilated by the fighting, which has also seen more than a million flee their homes in northern Uganda.
Weeks of talks in the Sudanese city of Juba ended this weekend with a ceasefire agreement which will go into effect tomorrow.
If it holds, LRA leader Joseph Kony and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni are expected to sign a full peace deal on September 12th.
"We hope that now the two principles will take action so that the guns can go silent," said chief mediator Riek Machar, south Sudan's vice-president.
Ugandan army sources said yesterday that rebel units were already moving out of their bases towards safe areas in neighbouring countries.
Under the terms of the truce, LRA troops will be given amnesty if they hand themselves into the containment areas within three weeks.
Since it first appeared in 1987, the LRA has established a reputation as one of the world's most brutal rebel movements.
Kony, its founder, has a semi-messianic agenda, claiming his war aim is to create a Ugandan state run according to the Ten Commandments.
In its attempts to wrest control of northern Uganda from the army, LRA units have systematically terrorised civilians, carrying out thousands of murders, rapes and mutilations.
The LRA has become infamous for child abductions; in one case more than 100 schoolgirls were seized, many of whom were later killed, raped or forced into marriage with LRA leaders. And thousands of children have been pressed into service as child soldiers with the LRA.
New York-based Human Rights Watch estimate that more than 10,000 children have been kidnapped, many of them raped, tortured and enslaved.
The attacks have seen much of northern Uganda depopulated, and children in farms and villages trekking each night to night shelters, guarded by troops, to escape the abductions.
LRA spokesman Obonyo Olveny said: "This is the first truce between the two sides in the 19-year-war. It is the first initiative of the international community to give the peace process a chance."
Uganda's army has been frustrated in trying to smash the rebels by their reliance on bases in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo from which to launch attacks.
But the amnesty has sparked a new controversy because it includes Kony and four of his commanders from indictments issued earlier this year by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
ICC officials have refused to sanction such a deal, fearing it would undermine the credibility of the court.
But Uganda, claiming it would save lives, says it will stick by the amnesty and not hand the commanders over to the ICC.
For several weeks, talks were held up by the government's insistence that the LRA demobilise, amid fears in Kampala that a truce would give the rebels time to reorganise and rearm.
Earlier this month, President Museveni warned that unless a deal was signed soon, his army would launch a new offensive against rebel bases in Democratic Republic of Congo.
It is this threat, and the agreement of the African Union to act as peace monitors, that appears to have pushed Kony to accept the truce offer.
Prospects for a long-term peace are unclear. The war began in 1987 when Kony took advantage of anger among the northern Acholi tribe over the coming to power of current President Museveni, whose power base is in southern Uganda.
Initially, the LRA enjoyed support from the Acholi, who claimed they had been pushed out of their traditional role as the leaders of Uganda.
While support among the Acholi for the LRA has eroded, grievances against the government remains.
Northern Uganda remains the poorer cousin of the more prosperous Kampala.
Northern MPs have accused the army of corruption and say the generals are using the war to get rich.
They have pointed to the recent "ghost soldiers" scandal where large sums of money were claimed by the generals to pay soldiers who were no longer in the army.