UNYAMA REFUGEE CAMP, northern Uganda: Auma Lilly lies uncomfortably on a mud bench outside her small hut. She tries to sell a dozen ripe mangoes that have fallen overnight from a nearby tree to make a living.

Lilly, a 65-year-old widow, is weak and vulnerable, coughing occasionally.

She cares not only for herself but also for her three young grandchildren after their parents were killed by rebel militants.

Her story is very common in this refugee camp in northern Uganda.

Dozens of other refugee camps dot Uganda and its neighboring countries - Sudan, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda.

Over the past two decades, millions of Ugandans have fled their villages amid conflict between government troops and rebels.

Now, slowly more than one million people are returning home imbued with optimism that the rebels - the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) - will sign a peace treaty.

The LRA has stopped fighting in northern Uganda and moved to the Congo. However, it is still feared LRA leader, Joseph Kony, who has postponed signing the peace agreement time and again, will never sign the deal.

This is one of the biggest refugee returns in modern African history. The future is uncertain, but Lilly and more than a million others are going back home to return to lives disrupted by a brutal civil war.

Unyama Camp is a sprawling community consisting of several hundred thatched-roof circular mud huts typical of the villages of the Acholi people.

Twenty minutes drive from the district of Gulu, the camp was opened in 1996, and at one time housed 60,000 people, said Komakeca Sanlio, a local official working there.

Sanlio, who was a refugee himself, recalled the brutalities inflicted by the LRA.

"The stealth (LRA) army tried to hide; they did not want people to see them," he said. "If you saw them when they came out of the forest and they caught you, they would kill you. They beat people to death with sticks and shot people with guns."

Nearly all the Acholi people came to the refuge camps with similar stories. The LRA not only killed people at will, but also kidnapped thousands of young boys and girls, forcing them to become child soldiers, forced laborers or sex slaves.

The LRA had claimed to represent the political wishes of the northern Acholi people against the southerners who supported the Ugandan government of President Yoweri Museveni.

But what the LRA did was soon supplanted by pillaging, rape and murder that turned their own people against them.

For the past two decades, government troops have been unable to defeat the rebels. The refugee camps are under the protection of Ugandan Army troops, with food from international aid agencies.

Life is not easy with seven to eight hundred huts barely a meter apart. There is no electricity, no running water. Refugees use wood to cook and lamb oil for lighting in their huts. They hang their cooking tools and small tables and chairs from their ceiling and sleep on the ground.

Now, people are anxious to return to their villages, some located just a few km from the camps, even though the prospects of peace are still slim.

Fighting has totally destroyed Lilly's village near the camp.

She has no money to build a new home after she returns. She doesn't even have the means to move with her grandchildren - her youngest grandchild, who became an orphan five months after he was born, is in the hospital fighting sickness.

Land is another problem for those who have been away from their homes for decades, said QB Kitara McMot, vice-chairman of Gulu district government.

"When they go back home, they will have the same land as they had 20 years ago. But some families have grown from six to 26. How can the land support the extra people?" McMot asked.

(China Daily 06/03/2008 page11)