It's an apparently trivial spat in one of Africa's many under-reported conflicts. Uganda's government is accusing aid agency Caritas of supplying Lord's Resistance Army rebels with food, thereby helping prolong the country's 20-year insurgency, according to a report in New Vision newspaper.

The rebels deny it, boasting in almost injured tones about their self-sufficiency and commitment to a faltering peace process. Nobody from Caritas was available for comment.

The row is the latest episode in a long struggle to keep aid and politics separate in Uganda. In the course of the conflict between the government and the LRA, around 2 million people were displaced, with many forced into government-run camps where they became dependent on aid. Since the camps were vulnerable to attacks by the rebels, some aid inevitably fell into the wrong hands.

Experts say the situation became institutionalised in August 2006 when aid agencies started supplying food directly to the LRA as part of the peace process brokered by Sudan. The theory was that if the international community fed the rebels, the LRA wouldn't have to loot villages near their hideouts in Central African Republic and Congo. It was also seen as a necessary move to get the LRA to the negotiating table.

The peace process has since all but broken down, and David Matsanga, the LRA's chief peace negotiator, told Voice of America the group hadn't received any food deliveries since April.

U.S.-based advocacy organisation Resolve Uganda also said the rebels had not been getting aid for months.

"The truth is that the minister is speaking out of line," said director Michael Poffenberger. "Caritas have not provided support to the LRA since April."

The affair highlights a dilemma that goes to the heart of humanitarianism. What should aid agencies do when violent groups stand between them and the people they're trying to help? How far is it possible to adhere to the much-vaunted principles of neutrality and "do no harm"?

Should aid agencies remain staunchly neutral, as Fiona Terry documents Medecins Sans Frontiers trying to do in her book "Condemned to repeat" when, forced to choose between sides in Cambodia, they simply withdrew? Or should relief workers stay put and navigate the situation pragmatically, getting aid to the people who need it in the knowledge that their operation may become part of the crisis?

The same questions were asked in eastern Congo in the aftermath of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, when aid agencies ran displacement camps teeming with Hutu extremists who had taken part in the slaughter.

Experts disagree about how well, in the case of Uganda, the aid world has responded to this most intractable of humanitarian dilemmas.

"It was absolutely necessary," said Poffenberger of the decision to supply the rebels as part of the peace process. "It was a controversial move, but without it you would not have been able to build the trust that was needed with the LRA to get them to negotiate."

Even given the subsequent unravelling of the peace process, he said, supporting the rebels was still the right thing to do. "No matter what, it produced some gains for the region."

Tim Allen, a professor of development anthropology at the London School of Economics who has written on the first indictments of LRA members by the International Criminal Court, agrees that humanitarian intervention inevitably involves an element of realpolitik.

"There's not a lot of point in negotiating with some traumatised granny or raped women," he said. "You're going to do that with the powerful people who can stop the violence."

But in his view the humanitarian world, in supporting the camps in northern Uganda where hundreds of thousands of civilians lingered in misery for years, overstepped the line.

"Aid agencies could have avoided being drawn into a system of violence," he said. "They could have refused, and the camps would have been closed. My own feeling is that agencies became drawn into a process that became so institutionalised that it almost became impossible to think outside the box."

Within aid agencies themselves, he added, harsh realities also play into the process, making it difficult for staff to speak out. "Humanitarians are on short contracts. People don't say, 'This whole programme is unacceptable, and sustaining structural violence on the population,' because they're getting paid and have got kids in school."

The World Food Programme - a main supplier of aid in Uganda through its partners - defends its neutrality staunchly, claiming that checks are always in place to track where food ends up.

"WFP does not feed combatants," said WFP spokeswoman Caroline Hurford. "If the LRA entered the camps where WFP had distributed it and stole it, it was not something the WFP or the Ugandan government could do much to avoid. We just cannot take responsibility for that side of it."

One thing that aid observers do agree on is that the dilemma is faced everywhere by those in the business of relieving suffering in the world's conflict zones.

"It's a dilemma that aid agencies face in a lot of conflicts," said Matthew Green, whose research for his book on LRA leader Joseph Kony, "Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt For Africa's Most Wanted", led him to conclude that humanitarian agencies' support for the government-run camps were fuelling rather than helping to end the crisis.

Part of the difficulty humanitarians face in negotiating such dilemmas, he said, lies with the way aid work gets caught up with public perceptions that favour an over-simplistic view of what's entailed in intervening in trouble spots.

"We basically want to believe in idea of the good guys and the bad guys," he said. "The political complexity is often overlooked."

The problem is compounded by aid agencies' need to put their best foot forward for fundraising purposes, and journalists' uncritical approach to what charities tell them, he goes on.

"There's always going to be vested interest in painting the most positive picture," Green said. "But it's also true that within the media there's quite a shallow grasp of these sorts of issues. It's always easy to privilege the narratives of the aid agencies over other narratives."

But while there may be no silver-bullet style solution to the problem, observers detect a growing willingness within the aid world to acknowledge how political realities affect even the most altruistic of businesses.

"There's a growing awareness amongst organisations of these sorts of issues," Green said.

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