South Sudan awaiting LRA rebels, sends food
Sept 4, 2006 (JUBA) — Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony has sent a group of fighters out of his Congo base as called for under a landmark truce, boosting hopes one of Africa’s longest insurgencies could be nearing an end.
A long-sought cessation of hostilities between the Ugandan army and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, notorious for their savagery and use of child soldiers, began last Tuesday.
Rebels are now supposed to assemble at two camps in southern Sudan while talks continue to end the war and win them a Uganda government amnesty.
Despite early accusations that both sides had violated the truce in relatively minor incidents, Uganda’s military said on Monday the deal was holding up well, and that rebels in the north had been seen heading towards the Sudan border.
“They are moving,” said army spokesman Major Felix Kulayigye. “We have to be patient, but we are on-track.”
South Sudan’s Security Minister Daniel Awet said he had information Kony had already sent some LRA rebels out of his main base in Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) lawless Garamba national park.
Speaking late on Sunday in the southern capital Juba, Awet said tonnes of maize, beans, rice, oil and medical supplies were en route to Ri-Kwangba, a remote outpost on the border between DRC and Sudan, where the LRA fighters were expected to gather.
The LRA rebels have three weeks to gather there from their hideout in Congo while peace talks — due to resume later on Monday — continue.
“Kony has already sent his first group. … We dispatched seven trucks of food so when this group arrives, they have something to eat,” Awet said.
“We don’t expect Kony to come (in the first group), but he could be somewhere near his forces.”
Awet did not give any more details, but Ugandan state media quoted security sources last week saying up to 200 LRA members, including women and children, had left the rebels’ camp in Garamba. Their destination was unclear.
Kony and his top deputies are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which accuses them of carrying out massacres, mutilating victims and kidnapping thousands of children to serve as fighters and sex slaves.
Two decades of fighting between troops and the LRA have uprooted nearly 2 million people in northern Uganda and destabilised parts of southern Sudan and eastern Congo.
Rebels in Congo are meant to trek to Ri-Kwangba, while Uganda’s army says it has given those in northern Uganda safe routes to reach another camp east of the Nile at Owiny-ki-Bul.
The chief mediator of the talks, southern Sudan’s Vice President Riek Machar, visited that site over the weekend to assure the LRA it was safe, aides said.
(Reuters)