LRA rebels should apologize before amnesty – Uganda
Sept 7, 2006 (KAMPALA) — Leaders of a rebel movement that has terrorized Uganda for two decades must come out of hiding and apologize before the government will consider pressing the International Criminal Court to drop a case against them, a government official said Thursday.
The Hague-based ICC issued arrest warrants earlier this year for Joseph Kony and four other top leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which is notorious for cutting off the tongues and lips of civilians and enslaving thousands of children.
“Kony needs to come out of the bush and say sorry for having committed crimes against humanity for the last 20 years,” said Kirunda Kivejinja, Uganda’s information minister.
Vincent Otti, the LRA’s second-in-command, said Tuesday that a comprehensive peace deal with the government is threatened by international arrests warrants. Just a week earlier, the LRA struck a truce calling for rebel fighters to emerge from the bush and gather in largely uninhabited areas across the border in southern Sudan, where they will be protected and monitored while a broader peace deal is negotiated.
President Yoweri Museveni has said he will not implement the warrants as long as the group negotiates peace.
Christian Palme, a spokesman for the ICC’s prosecutor’s office, said the warrants remained in effect. If Uganda asked to scrap the warrants, only a panel of judges would be empowered to nullify them.
Palme said government officials in Kampala were keeping the court updated on the peace talks, and that Uganda shared the ICC prosecutor’s view that “justice and peace can work together and will continue to go together.”
“The peace process is in an early stage and it is not helpful to speculate about an outcome,” Palme said in the Netherlands.
Kony is accused of 12 counts of crimes against humanity and 21 counts of war crimes. The other suspects “are also accused of war crimes, including intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population,” Interpol said in June when it issued so-called “red notices” based on charges issued by the ICC.
Last week’s truce presented the greatest possibility yet for a breakthrough in pacifying the African region that joins northern Uganda, eastern Congo and southern Sudan. Rebels from all three nations operated across borders with impunity for decades until a peace accord halted Congo’s civil war in 2003 and southern Sudanese rebels joined Sudan’s government in 2005.
The LRA was formed from the remnants of a northern Uganda rebellion that began in 1986 after Museveni, a southerner, overthrew a brutal military junta.
Kony, the LRA leader, mixed politics with religious mysticism, declaring himself a Christian prophet fighting to rule this country of 26 million people according to the Ten Commandments.
U.N. officials estimate the LRA has kidnapped 20,000 children in the past 19 years, turning the boys into soldiers and the girls into sex slaves for rebel commanders.
(AP/ST)