Kampala  - Hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians in Uganda are reluctant to return home despite a scale-down in the fighting between the rebels and government forces, aid workers said Wednesday.

Only 290,000 people have returned home in the war-devastated northern region since the end of 2005 out of over 1.2 million, according to the latest report by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

About 370,000 other people of the total displaced population are living in camps closer to their homes, the report said.

Return is slow because people are unsure about their security, OCHA's spokesperson in Kampala, Kristen Knutson, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"People are not moving overwhelmingly into their former villages. One of the reasons is the uncertainty about the peace process," she said.

Northern Uganda was engulfed in a civil war waged over two decades by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The conflict forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes while thousands of others were killed, mutilated or abducted by the rebels.

Fighting began scaling down in late 2004 when the rebels moved from their southern Sudan bases into the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, the two sides have yet to sign the final peace treaty.

The LRA wants the International Criminal Court (ICC) to withdraw arrests warrants against five of its leaders and the government to guarantee they will be tried in Ugandan courts before inking the deal. (dpa)