Uganda peace talks stall after landmark truce
Sept 8, 2006 (JUBA) — The expected resumption of peace talks between Uganda and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army has stalled as mediators try to build on a landmark truce, officials said Friday.
Negotiations had been due to resume this week after the truce took effect on August 29, but mediators are reluctant to bring the sides together again until major gaps on contentious post-conflict issues are narrowed, they said.
Although the cessation of hostilities accord appears to be holding, rebel fighters have yet to gather at camps in southern Sudan, as they are to do under the pact, and Ugandan and LRA officials have traded barbs in recent days.
The rebels said this week there could be no peace deal until international war crimes charges against their top leaders are dropped, something Uganda says it will ask for only after a settlement is reached.
Kampala and the LRA both insist they are committed to ending the brutal, two-decade war that has ravaged northern Uganda, but sticking points over how to proceed have kept them from resuming direct discussions, officials said.
“There are always periods of up and down, and after 20 years of war it would be surprising if it were all smooth progress,” said Hizkias Assefa, an Ethiopian professor who coordinates an international mediation team.
Mediators have spent the last two days shuttling between the two delegations at the talks’ venue in the southern Sudanese capital of Juba, attempting to forge compromise positions on military and political representation, he said.
“Meetings will continue but will likely remain in separate groups until their positions are brought closer,” Hizkias told AFP.
Chief mediator Riek Machar, the vice president of southern Sudan, is trying to bridge wide divides in the two sides’ initial positions on the status of the Ugandan army, control of northern Uganda and post-war development, he said.
Kampala has flatly rejected LRA demands for vast cuts in the military and 40-percent representation in the reduced force, as well as demands for complete autonomy in the north under a radically altered federal constitution.
In addition, there is the question of the International Criminal Court’s war crimes charges against elusive LRA supremo Joseph Kony, his deputy, Vincent Otti and three other top rebel commanders, two of whom are still alive.
Otti said Tuesday that no LRA fighter would give up unless those charges are dropped, but Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has refused to ask the ICC to quash the indictments until a peace deal is signed.
At the same time, the ICC has said its charges remain in place and it continues to expect that member states will live up to their obligations to arrest indictees.
A schedule for the resumption of direct talks remains unclear as the LRA team have asked for a one-week break to consult their leaders, still believed holed up near Sudan’s western border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“There is likely to be a visit to the west,” LRA spokesman Obonyo Olweny told AFP. “We need to put details before the High Command.”
Assefa said despite the delays, “significant progress is being made” but held out hope that the LRA delegation’s trip would not force a complete halt in the talks.
“We would hope that some members of the LRA delegation remain here to continue the process of negotiation,” he said.
The Juba talks are seen by many as the best way to end the conflict in northern Uganda that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly two million more.
The conflict is regularly described by UN and aid workers as one of the world’s worst and most-forgotten humanitarian crises, with the area’s impoverished civilian population subjected to massive abuses and neglect.
(ST/AFP)