UN’s humanitarian chief meets Ugandan rebel leader
Nov 12, 2006 (RI-KWANGBA, Sudan) — The U.N.’s humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, met Sunday with a Ugandan rebel chief wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
Egeland held talks with the Lord’s Resistance Army leader, Joseph Kony, in a jungle clearing in southern Sudan in a bid to help free women and children enslaved by the cult-like group during their 20-year conflict with the Ugandan government.
They exchanged a brief, formal handshake before holding talks under a green, U.N.-erected tent. After the talks, Egeland told journalists that the LRA had agreed to give the U.N. an assessment of how many women and children were in its camps.
Egeland is the first high-ranking U.N. official to meet Kony, who has declared himself a Christian prophet fighting to rule Uganda and its 26 million people by the Ten Commandments.
The infamous rebel leader kept Egeland waiting for two hours at the makeshift camp close to the border with Congo. He also denied that the insurgency group was holding any women or children.
“We don’t have any children,” said Kony, dressed in military fatigues and sunglasses and guarded by 30 soldiers in Wellington boots and a ragtag assortment of clothes. “We only combatants,” he told journalists in a brief impromptu news conference in the forest clearing. “There are no wounded persons in LRA.”
Egeland later described the meeting as a success, and said the LRA would report on the numbers of women and children in its camps. He didn’t give any explanation for the discrepancy with Kony’s statement on women and children in the camps.
Kony has only appeared in public a handful of times, fearing arrest and extradition to the Hague to answer war crimes charges. During the LRA’s two-decade insurgency, the group has been blamed for murder, mutilations and kidnapping children for use as soldiers and sex slaves.
Almost 2 million people have been displaced by the conflict, aid organizations say.
Egeland traveled by helicopter to Ri-Kwangba, a neutral zone 500 meters north of the Congo border where the rebels are to gather under the terms of a peace deal with the Ugandan government. He was accompanied by Riek Machar, vice president of southern Sudan and chief mediator in peace talks, a team of U.N. security officials and Ugandan government and rebel negotiators.
He also met with Vincent Otti, the LRA deputy who is also wanted for war crimes.
Security was extremely tight. Around 100 LRA fighters loitered on the outskirts of the clearing.
“I am a humanitarian worker, I help people by relating to people who can unlock situations,” Egeland told journalists late Saturday before his party officially announced the visit.
Last year, the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Kony, Otti and three other LRA commanders on numerous charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Egeland said he was unwilling to discuss the issue of the arrest warrants, which the rebels say threaten the fragile peace deal signed with the government in southern Sudan’s capital, Juba.
The rebels want the warrants dropped before they sign a comprehensive peace deal, while the Ugandan government says it will ask for them to be lifted only after a full agreement is reached.
Uganda’s government welcomed Egeland’s meeting with Kony.
“If he can secure the release of women and children through his meeting then that would be a very positive boost for the Juba talks,” Ruhakana Rugunda, head of the government negotiating team and Uganda’s minister of internal affairs, said late Saturday.
After his two-day visit to Juba, Egeland will fly on to the troubled Darfur region in Sudan’s west. The trip will be his last to Africa as the U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. He steps down next month.
(AP)