(Bloomberg) -- Uganda vowed to expel Sudanese rebel leaders living in the country, signaling a potential thaw in relations between two African nations that in the past have accused each other of supporting anti-government insurgencies.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Sudanese second Vice President Hasabo Abdel-Rahman agreed that “the dissidents of Sudan in Uganda should leave” during a meeting in the capital, Kampala, this week, Ugandan Foreign Affairs spokesman Fred Opolot said by phone on Thursday. A statement on the website of Sudan’s foreign ministry in Khartoum confirmed an agreement on “ending activities of negative groups.”
“This might prove to be Khartoum’s most significant diplomatic breakthrough in the region since the rapprochement with Chad,” Magdi el-Gizouli, a fellow at the Nairobi-based Rift Valley Institute, a research group, said Thursday in a response to e-mailed questions.
Both Sudan and Uganda have been wracked by armed rebellions since achieving independence in the second half of the 20th century. Southern Sudanese battling the government in the capital, Khartoum, took sanctuary in neighboring Uganda during at least two decades of conflict that led to South Sudan’s independence in 2011.
The Arabic language version of the statement on Sudan’s foreign ministry website denied Sudan had relations with the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Central African insurgency led by Ugandan Joseph Kony, which Uganda previously accused it of backing.
“Some Sudanese dissidents were asked to leave” last year, while Museveni has directed security agencies to investigate the presence of others, Opolot said.
Museveni, who himself came to power in 1986 after fighting a guerrilla war, has led a more than two-decade campaign against the LRA, a rebel group that emerged in northern Uganda claiming to be inspired by the Bible’s 10 commandments.
The LRA was driven out of Uganda in 2005 and is active in parts of Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. The United Nations says the group has killed about 100,000 people over the past quarter century.
Uganda has previously accused Sudan of providing logistics and shelter for the group. In December, the U.S. urged Sudan to allow an African Union mission access to a border area where Kony was alleged to have taken refuge.
Sudan is battling insurgencies in its western Darfur region as well as in two states bordering South Sudan. Sudan’s foreign ministry said in the statement that “hostile elements and groups harbored by Uganda” have supported and carried out “aggressions” in these areas.
The Justice and Equality Movement, the Darfur region’s largest rebel group, said it has “no political presence at all” in Uganda. The group hasn’t heard about anyone being expelled, spokesman Gibreel Adam Bilal said in an e-mailed response to questions.
A spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, which is fighting in the southern states, didn’t reply to two e-mails seeking comment.
“At one point all leaders” of the Sudanese Revolutionary Front, a rebel coalition, “frequented or resided in Kampala,” El-Gizouli said. “It is probably too early to be sure whether they have or will soon leave, but the fact that Sudan and Uganda are talking at that level is already remarkable.”