Ugandan refugees heading home

Lira has been relatively calm since 200 people were killed in Barlonyo camp

Thousands of people who have fled their homes in northern Uganda are preparing to go home, officials say.

Some 40,000 people left camps in urban areas in Lira district in May and June.

A Lira district official said that that there had been no serious attacks by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) for three months.

The LRA has been fighting for 18 years and is notorious for abducting children. The boys are forced to become fighters and the girls sex slaves.

'Planning needed'

The International Criminal Court is investigating the LRA, for allegedly committing war crimes.

More than a million people have fled their homes across northern Uganda.

The World Food Programme is backing the return of the refugees, saying there has been no major LRA attack in north-eastern Uganda since February.

It has started providing food to some 260,000 people to take back to their homes.

"People are moving back to their villages, or to camps nearer to their homes," said WFP Uganda Country Representative Ken Noah Davies.

"The rations are meant to provide food until their first harvest season and to encourage more people to return to their villages to resume normal lives," he said.

The minister for the rehabilitation of northern Uganda, Grace Okello, said that the government needed to start planning for the return of these people next spring - if the current political situation continued.