Uganda-LRA rebel talks adjourned to Friday

Aug 15, 2006 (JUBA) — Talks between Ugandan negotiators and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) representatives were adjourned on Tuesday after the rebels said they were mourning a guerrilla commander killed by Ugandan troops.

Raska Lukwiya, one of five LRA officers wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC), was gunned down on Saturday in northern Uganda’s remote Kitgum district.

LRA representatives wore black armbands and said news of his death had shaken them, but that they would resume negotiations in southern Sudan’s capital Juba on Friday.

“We have presented our position paper on cessation of hostilities and we are now going to mourn the death of our commander,” the LRA’s head of delegation, Martin Ojul, told Reuters at the talks’ venue. “We will be back here on Friday.”

Uganda’s team in Juba accused the rebels of time-wasting.

“Our view is that we should expeditiously go through this process because time is not on our side,” said the Ugandan delegation spokesman, Captain Paddy Ankunda. “One Ugandan dead is one too many. The faster, the better, for all of us.”

In a statement issued in The Hague on Monday, the ICC said Lukwiya had served as the rebels’ army commander in early 2004, “a period during which the LRA was perpetrating its most deadly attacks upon the civilian population of Northern Uganda”.

South Sudan’s government says it wants to broker an end to the LRA’s 20-year insurrection, which has uprooted nearly two million people in northern Uganda and destabilised south Sudan.

(Reuters)