S. Sudan Machar: Most Ugandan rebels left southern Sudan
June 22, 2006 (CAIRO) — More than 90 percent of Ugandan rebels have left their refuge in southern Sudan, showing that the policy of paying the notorious outlaws to go has been a success, the vice president of the autonomous region said Thursday.
Vice-President Riek Machar said he believed the Lord’s Resistance Army fighters had crossed from southern Sudan into the Democratic Republic of Congo, but U.N. and Congolese officials in Kinshasa said they had no evidence of that.
Machar said his administration’s attempts to mediate an end to the LRA’s 20-year rebellion in northern Uganda have been stalled because the Ugandan government has not sent negotiators to Juba, the southern Sudanese capital, where peace talks are due to be held.
The payments to LRA leader Joseph Kony have raised criticism, since Kony and four other LRA commanders have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
During their rebellion, LRA gunmen kidnapped thousands of children, forcing them to become fighters, porters or concubines. The group, which claims to espouse a mystical ideology based on the Ten Commandments, has killed thousands of civilians and forced more than a million people to flee their homes in Uganda.
It set up rear bases in southern Sudan in the mid-1990s, when it allegedly received backing from the Khartoum government in retaliation for Uganda’s support of the southern Sudanese rebels.
As Khartoum’s support for the LRA dwindled, particularly after it made peace with the southern rebels in January 2005, the LRA turned their guns on the Sudanese, killing people and looting villages.
Machar said Thursday that in a meeting in the southern Sudan bush on May 3, he gave Kony US$20,000 and stocks of food to ensure that the rebels would leave Sudan without plundering any more villages.
“If this tricked them to move away, that’s fine with me,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Juba. “Our people are better off than before.”
He said the policy was “definitely a success,” estimating that “over 90 percent” of the LRA fighters had left Sudan.
The head of the United Nations mission in southern Sudan, James Ellery, said the region’s government has managed to get “large numbers of LRA” to move across the border.
“There have been very few incidents (of LRA violence) in the past weeks,” Ellery told the AP in a call from his office in Juba this week.
He avoided commenting on the payments to the rebels but praised southern Sudan for “being consistent in its policy” of trying to broker peace, persuade the LRA to leave, and holding any military option as a last resort.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has strongly criticized the payments to the LRA. “Southern Sudan’s leaders should arrest people accused of horrific war crimes, not give them food and money,” HRW’s co-ordinator for East Africa, Jemera Rone, said in a statement on June 3.
At the meeting in the bush, Machar reportedly persuaded Kony to enter into negotiations with the Ugandan government. A video of the encounter — given by Sudanese officials to Uganda and later aired in international media — showed Machar handing bundles of cash to Kony and telling him not to spend it on ammunition.
Machar told AP he believed the LRA fighters had entered neighboring Congo.
In Kinshasa, presidential aide Antoine Ghonda and U.N. mission spokesman Jean Okala, said there was no evidence the LRA was in the country. “The LRA aren’t in Congo, at least no one has given us any proof,” Ghonda said.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has said he would give the LRA until the end of July to negotiate peace through southern Sudanese mediators.
Machar said the LRA, which has a negotiating team in Juba, is ready for talks. “So we are waiting for the delegation of the government of Uganda,” he said.
In Kampala on Thursday, Ugandan Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Felix Kulayigye said, “We are waiting for Southern Sudanese authorities to tell us ‘Conditions are right, so come.'”
He did not elaborate on the required conditions, but added, “Nothing is holding us back, except the final communication from Juba.”
(ST/AP)