South Sudan organises talks with Uganda’s LRA rebels
June 8, 2006 (JUBA) — The southern Sudan government is organising talks with the Lord’s Resistance Army and Ugandan officials in the hope that the rebels will leave Sudan forever, South Sudan’s president said on Thursday.
The Ugandan LRA, notorious for killing civilians, abducting children and mutilating victims in a campaign without clear political aim, has taken refuge in the lawless south of Sudan, which was embroiled in its own civil war for 21 years before a peace deal in January 2005.
An advance LRA delegation arrived in a hotel in South Sudan’s capital Juba to set up the negotiations. South Sudan President Salva Kiir said a delegation from Uganda had been invited to join them but he gave no exact timing for this.
“You can talk about days, you can talk about hours. But it is something that is going to happen,” he told a news conference after meeting a visiting United Nations Security Council delegation from New York.
The LRA has kidnapped at least 10,000 children, forced them to kill and used them as sex slaves.
Four remaining leaders of the LRA, including elusive leader Joseph Kony, have been indicted by the International Criminal Court, the world’s first permanent global criminal tribunal, for crimes against humanity.
After a rare meeting between the vice president of South Sudan, Riek Machar, and Kony last month, the LRA agreed to negotiations with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
Museveni has given the LRA until the end of July to lay down their arms and begin talks.
“I WANT HIM TO LEAVE”
Asked if he would meet Kony himself, Kiir, who is also first vice-president of the central Sudan government, told a news conference, “If there is a possibility I can meet him, then why not. I want him to leave south Sudan. But it has not come to that stage. I don’t know really where he is.”
The LRA’s deputy leader, Vincent Otti, also under indictment by the International Criminal Court, is expected to head the groups’ delegation, a government source told Reuters.
Kiir said the LRA had been terrorising southern Sudan as well as northern Uganda.
“As for me, I don’t want them to stay in south Sudan,” he said. “This is why we have opted for peace and once this peace is concluded they would have no business in south Sudan.
“They have been raping women and girls. They have been killing. They have been looting. They have been abducting.”
Kiir said he would help arrest LRA leaders if that was an option, but that this had not succeeded because “some new commanders would come up”.
The United Nations has a large peacekeeping mission in southern Sudan to monitor the 2005 peace deal.
Kiir spoke to reporters after a lengthy session with 15 Security Council members, in Sudan mainly to get Khartoum’s consent to a peacekeeping force in violent Darfur.
The group will go to Darfur and Chad before ending its trip in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Britain’s U.N. ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, said the Security Council had asked Kiir for a full account because the LRA was a threat to peace and security in the region.
He said the political process was to be encouraged for the bulk of the LRA but that the indictments “should be given effect.”
(Reuters)