LRA rebels reiterate call for South African role in peace talks

Aug 21, 2006 (JUBA) — Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army called Monday for South Africa to play an unofficial role in peace talks after the government rejected an appeal for South African mediation.

After Kampala’s rebuff of their proposal for Pretoria to co-mediate the negotiations in the southern Sudanese capital of Juba, the LRA said they wanted members of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to participate.

“We would like the (commission) to help provide the team in Juba with technical know-how,” said LRA delegation chief Martin Ojul. “South Africa is more experienced than any other country in Africa in such issues.”

“We would like South Africa to be involved to strengthen the process, not by asking to replace the existing mediators, but to strengthen it with the experience of the commission,” he told AFP.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been credited with helping the country’s peaceful transition to majority rule by providing a forum for apartheid-era crimes to be addressed.

“Having them coming here would benefit the mediation and after a negotiated settlement it would help to implement real truth and reconciliation in Uganda,” Ojul said.

He said the rebel request would be put to chief mediator Riek Machar, the vice president of southern Sudan, but the Ugandan government, which last week nixed the appeal for South African mediation.

“It is not necessary and we are quite happy with the mediation of Riek Machar,” the spokesman for Kampala’s delegation Paddy Ankunda said. “We see no need for this.”

South Africa said at the weekend it had receieved no request to join the peace talks, which are aimed at ending northern Uganda’s brutal 20-year conflict.

The on-again, off-again negotiations that began last month are due to resume on Monday with the rebels presenting a position paper on demobilization, disarmament and reconciliation, officials said.

The talks have faltered at several points, notably with top LRA commanders, including supremo Joseph Kony, refusing appeals to attend and the government rejecting rebel demands for a ceasefire ahead of a comprehensive settlement.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and some two million displaced in northern Uganda since the LRA took leadership of a regional rebellion among the Acholi ethnic minority in 1988.

Kony wants to replace Museveni’s government with one based on the Biblical Ten Commandments.

Several previous peace efforts have failed and the Juba talks are seen as the best chance yet to end a war described by the United Nations as one of the world’s worst and most forgotten humanitarian crises.

(AFP/ST)