South Sudan launches Uganda peace talks
June 8, 2006 (JUBA) — South Sudan announced the launch of negotiations to end more than two decades of fighting in northern Uganda and appealed for the withdrawal of international arrest warrants out against rebel chiefs.
Riek Machar, deputy head of south Sudan’s autonomous regional government, said Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony had agreed take part in landmark peace talks in the region’s capital Juba.
“We have initiated the peace process and we hope it will bring lasting peace in northern Uganda and south Sudan,” Machar said after holding talks with the visiting delegation from the UN Security Council.
He said talks were already underway with an “advance party” of the LRA in Juba, but were waiting for the arrival of a Ugandan government delegation.
Machar said south Sudan was working with “friendly” countries to negotiate the withdrawal of the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants out against five leaders of the LRA, which is accused of systematically kidnapping children for use as fighters or sex slaves.
“The ICC should differentiate between a political process and a legal process. The main agenda of this process is peace,” he said, adding that they had asked Britain and the United States to support the talks.
“The UN Security Council welcomed our position, although it was were more supportive of the ICC position. But the Council also said it sees the reason why we had to chose the option of peace talks rather than war,” Machar told AFP by satellite phone.
Earlier Thursday, Sudan’s Vice President Salva Kiir defended talks with the Ugandan rebels.
Kiir told the UN Security Council delegation that the peace talks with LRA rebels were a necessary evil to end decades of conflict in the region.
The vice president, who also heads the autonomous regional government of south Sudan, acknowledged that LRA fighters had been “raping women, looting, abducting” in their rear bases in south Sudan as well as across the border in Uganda.
But he added: “What we want is peace and peace has to be negotiated”.
British ambassador to the United Nations, Emyr Jones Parry, said the international community was keen to end once and for all a rebellion that has killed tens of thousands of people and left some two million homeless over the past 18 years.
“The Security Council … thinks that the regional dimension of the LRA makes it a threat to the peace and stability of the region and it would very much like this scourge to be eliminated,” he said.
The talks come just weeks after a landmark meeting between Machar and Kony, one of the world’s most wanted men, in early May.
On May 17, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni set a July deadline for Kony to agree to peace talks or face military destruction.
Kony and four of his lieutenants are among the world’s most-wanted rebel commanders, having been indicted on numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity charges by the 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 human rights groups and others about meeting Kony and other war crimes indictees.
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.
The regional coordinator of the UN Mission in Sudan, James Ellery, said: “The LRA has no agenda here, it’s a curse”.
(ST)