Sudan’s first vice president to hand over Ugandan rebel leader to ICC

Oct 8, 2005 (KHARTOUM) — First Vice President Salva Kiir Mayardit said Saturday that he would hand over a Ugandan rebel leader to the International Criminal Court if he was found.

Kiir’s remarks came days after it was announced that the ICC had issued arrest warrants for Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and four of his deputies. Uganda’s defense minister said Friday that he believed Kony was in southern Sudan.

“I don’t know where Kony is, and if I find him, I’ll hand him over to the ICC,” Kiir told reporters after meeting Javier Solana, the EU’s security affairs chief.

The LRA has bases in southern Sudan’s Eastern Equatoria state, from which it launches cross-border raids against Ugandan forces. The group has also been blamed for some attacks against Sudanese civilians.

Kiir, who is also the president of the Southern Sudanese government, said last month that he favored negotiations to persuade the LRA to lay down its arms. If talks failed, he said, the LRA must be forced to leave southern Sudan.

The LRA is infamous for abducting more than 30,000 children, forcing them to become fighters, porters or concubines, during its 19-year insurgency. The group has killed thousands of civilians and forced more than a million to flee their homes, but appears to have no clear political agenda and very little contact with the outside world.

The LRA’s presence in remote southern Sudan faces a setback with the end of this country’s southern civil war under a peace accord signed in January.

Sudan once backed the LRA in its insurgency against the Ugandan government, which was supporting the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army in its civil war with the Sudanese government in return.

But Sudan and Uganda normalized relations in 2001 and Ugandan troops have since been allowed to operate in some parts of southern Sudan to battle the LRA.

The ICC arrest warrants for Kony and his deputies were the first issued by the court, the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal. The warrants were announced this week by William Lacy Swing, the top U.N. envoy for Congo.

(AP/ST)