Northern Uganda has been the centre of a brutal, two-decade insurgency by a cult-like rebel group that saw 2 million people uprooted from their homes and tens of thousands kidnapped, mutilated or killed.

• More than 20,000 children abducted
• Over 620,000 people still in camps
• Violence and disease killed 1,000 a week at height of conflict

Led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is notorious for massacring civilians, slicing off the lips of survivors and kidnapping children for use as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.

The long conflict has threatened to destabilise the volatile central African region with Kony's rebels seeking shelter in neighbouring countries and violence spilling across borders.

A landmark truce brokered in August 2006 by neighbouring south Sudan has brought relative stability to war-weary northern Uganda.

But Kony has repeatedly failed to sign a final peace deal, demanding guarantees that he will not be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, which wants to try him for war crimes. His rebels are now camped out in Congo where they continue to kill and abduct civilians.

Violence also plagues Uganda's northeastern Karamoja region, where an influx of small arms has exacerbated banditry and cattle raiding. Karamoja often suffers from drought and food shortages, with more than a million people needing aid in 2009.