South Sudan’s Salva Kiir defends aid to Ugandan rebels
May 30, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Sudan’s First Vice President Salva Kiir defended giving aid to the wanted Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) saying it would help start peace talks and stop them looting and killing in the lawless south.
In a videotaped meeting in early May between south Sudan’s vice president, Riek Machar, and LRA chief Joseph Kony, Machar secured a request for peace talks and handed Kony a wad of cash saying it was $20,000 to buy “food… not ammunition.”
Kiir, also president of autonomous southern Sudan, said the LRA had chosen the path of peace and approached his government to mediate talks with the Ugandan government. Kampala has given Kony until the end of July to stop the rebellion before talks.
“This is the only way to stop them from killing, from raping … what is wrong with that if that can bring them back to law abiding citizens of Uganda?” Kiir asked reporters late on Monday night in Khartoum.
Kony and his four top commanders were the first to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague last year. That sent him on the run from his bases in southern Sudan where he has sought refuge during two decades of fighting.
A 2005 peace deal ended Sudan’s north-south conflict and put Kiir’s former rebels in charge of southern Sudan. But Kiir’s army is undisciplined and underpaid, making it difficult to engage the LRA let alone arrest them for the ICC.
“We took this decision because the people who they kill are southern Sudanese, the women they rape are southern Sudanese women and girls, and the boys they abduct are southern Sudanese,” said Kiir. “And so how do we stop them from all these things?”
Kiir was positive that the talks would succeed.
“I believe when we start to talk with Kony and the government of Uganda, in a very short time we will bring peace to northern Uganda and by that we would also bring peace to southern Sudan,” he said.
The Ugandan ambassador to Khartoum, Mull Katende, said they were waiting to hear back from Kony on where and when the talks would begin.
But some analysts believe Kony is just buying time until the LRA sets up in the remote northern forests of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where they will be out of reach of Uganda and Sudanese troops.
The LRA has no clear political aims. Kony is a self-proclaimed mystic who believes he is possessed. Previous talks have failed.
The ICC has no police force of its own and relies on member nations to comply with arrest warrants. Sudan has signed but not ratified the treaty creating the ICC.
Khartoum has refused to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction in a separate conflict in its remote western Darfur region where the world court is investigating alleged war crimes.
(Reuters)