Sudan Marchar, Unganda LRA rebels meet over peace talks
June 7, 2006 (NAIROBI) — Members of southern Sudan’s autonomous government met Wednesday with senior commanders from Uganda’s notorious rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to press a peace initiative, an official said.
South Sudan Vice President Riak Machar said that he was heading the talks in a bid to advance the possibility of a negotiated settlement between the LRA and Kampala.
“I am currently meeting an LRA delegation in southern Sudan,” he said, declining to identify the rebel leaders he was seeing. “We are discussing peace in northern Uganda.”
The talks come just weeks after a landmark meeting between Machar and elusive LRA supremo Joseph Kony, one of the world’s most wanted men, in early May.
In that meeting, Kony agreed to a southern Sudanese mediation offer proposed by Machar to end nearly two decades of a brutal war in northern Uganda that has killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly two million.
Machar refused to say where Wednesday’s meeting was taking place but informed sources said the talks were in the provisional southern Sudanese capital of Juba where an LRA team arrived on Tuesday amid tight security.
“It is a top-level LRA delegation,” said one source. “The south Sudan government is trying to find ways of either launching peace talks between the LRA and Uganda or exploring any other way to end the rebellion.”
Kony and four of his top lieutenants are among the world’s most-wanted rebel commanders, having been indicted on numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity charges by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Last week, the global police organization Interpol issued arrest notices for the five, advising police forces in its 184 member states they are subjects of ICC indictments.
Sudan is not party to the international treaty that created the ICC and southern Sudanese officials have rejected criticism from rights groups and others about meeting Kony and other war crimes indictees.
Machar’s first meeting with Kony was held in a remote clearing near the Sudanese and Ugandan borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and produced the first images of the rebel leader in many years.
The self-proclaimed prophet and mystic has for 18 years led the LRA in its ostensible fight to create a government based on the Biblical 10 Commandments in Uganda.
But the group has become infamous for its tactics, which include atrocities committed against civilians, particularly the kidnapping children: girls to be sex slaves and boys to be fighters.
The United Nations says the war in northern Uganda is one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters and complains that it has largely gone unnoticed by the international community.
(ST)