By Skye Wheeler YAMBIO, Sudan, June 13 (Reuters) - Security forces in southern Sudan are in desperate need for training and funding to protect civilians against attacks by Ugandan rebels, aid agency World Vision said in a report on Wednesday. Civilians and officials in Western Equatoria state, where Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels had been staying under a Sudanese-brokered truce with the government in Kampala, have blamed the guerrillas for looting, raping, killing and abducting children in the area. "The little that has been done to alleviate LRA-induced insecurities has been, at best, insufficient and too late," the report, called 'Reluctant Hosts' said. It said that while much attention had been focused on the talks aimed at ending two decades of civil war in northern Uganda, there was little attention to the plight of southern Sudanese who have suffered from LRA attacks. The LRA deny any attacks or abductions, but local residents have no doubt who is to blame. "They took six girls up to now," said Zachariah Nzari, a tribal chief in the area close to the LRA assembly site Ri-Kwangba. Nzari said that four people had been killed and a further seven are presumed killed by the LRA after they disappeared in 2006. The LRA also destroyed some 75 houses in his village. Nzari's community is still too afraid to go into a nearby forest which they depend on for foods and building materials. The report said the local government should clear bushes alongside roads immediately to increase safety and support the local economy. Donors and the United Nations should provide local security forces with training, communications equipment and upgrade the airports to allow speedy deployment in case of attack. The LRA and the Ugandan government's peace talks in the capital of southern Sudan, Juba -- mediated by south Sudan's Vice President Riek Machar -- have been under way since July but little progress had been made so far. VICTIMS Western Equatoria Governor Samuel Abu John said in the report that his people, emerging from two decades of their own civil war, have become victims of Uganda's faltering peace talks. Sudan's north-south civil war ended in January 2005 and hundreds of thousands of southern Sudanese have returned home, straining the area's infrastructure in one of the poorest corners of the world. South Sudan's autonomous government, formed after the 2005 deal, said removing the LRA who sought refuge in lawless south Sudan during the civil war there, was vital to the recovery of the war-torn region. And peace talks seemed the best solution. Deputy governor of Western Equatoria, Joseph Ngere Paciko, said more than 50 people had been killed by the LRA since 2005 and at least 16 children have been abducted. "Although killings have (been) reduced since the talks began, looting has continued, even two weeks ago they looted," he said, adding the state wanted a voice at the Ugandan peace talks in Juba to present their complaints. "Fear is an overwhelming factor shaping people's lives in the area of research" said Sophie Gordon the report's main author.
