NAIROBI, 6 March 2004 — A southern Sudanese armed group switched sides yesterday to rejoin the country’s largest rebel movement and said the newly allied forces had launched a major operation against Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army insurgents holed up in southern Sudan.

The Equatoria Defense Forces had been on the side of Khartoum in Sudan’s devastating civil war since 1991, when they broke away from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

At a ceremony in Nairobi marking the formal merger of the EDF and SPLA, EDF Commander in Chief Theophilous Ochang Lotti told reporters that forces from both groups had already “launched a big operation to kick out the LRA from Sudan. It started 10 days ago.”

Uganda has recently renewed a long-standing accusation that the Khartoum government was supporting and harboring LRA fighters, who hit the headlines around the world two weeks ago when they killed more than 200 civilians in a camp for displaced people in northern Uganda.

On Thursday, an the SPLA said it had fought fierce battles with the LRA in southern Sudan earlier in the week. Both Lotti and the SPLA said the LRA had been attacking villages, killing civilians and looting in the area.

A joint SPLA-EDF statement said they had decided to join forces for the sake of “reconciliation, forgiveness and unity for the people of Sudan in general and south Sudan in particular.”

Meanwhile, Sudanese rebels said the have killed 86 members of LRA in fighting that broke out after the guerrilla group committed its worst massacre in years, a Sudanese rebel spokesman said yesterday.

The Sudanese rebels said they had fought more than a week of skirmishes with the LRA in southern Sudan, where the Ugandan movement has long maintained rear bases used to attack villagers in their home country.

LRA rebels shot, hacked and burned to death more than 230 civilians in northern Uganda in one of their worst mass killings in a 17-year-old insurgency last month, according to a death toll given by local officials. Sudanese rebels, who have often clashed with the LRA over control of parts of southern Sudan, said the latest fighting had been triggered by LRA attacks on their positions south of Juba.

“The fighting is still going on,” said George Riek Machar, spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. “We have been fighting for the last eight days south of Juba against a force commanded by LRA second in command Vincent Otti,” he said.

Separately, a smaller Sudanese rebel group said they had launched an offensive to crush the LRA, saying the group would prevent peace taking hold in southern Sudan despite progress at talks between the Khartoum government and southern rebels.

Theophilous Ochang Lotti, chairman of the Equatoria Defense Force, also said his group had merged with the larger SPLA, saying progress at the peace talks had narrowed differences between the former rebel rivals. “We have launched operations to crush the LRA in southern Sudan,” Lotti told a news conference in Nairobi, which is hosting the peace talks.

Meanwhile, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers has warned that scores of thousands of Sudanese refugees in inhospitable eastern Chad face “problems of sanitation and access to drinking water”.

Lubbers on Thursday wound up a three-day visit to the impoverished Central African country to assess the plight of people who have fled across the border from fighting in Sudan’s western Darfur province.

“We’re working to solve the logistical problems faced by these refugees, in cooperation with NGOs (non-governmental organizations),” Lubbers told a press conference N’djamena before leaving the country.