LRA rebels to visit Uganda to boost peace talks
October 30, 2007 (NAIROBI) — Ugandan rebels will this week make a landmark visit to Uganda to seek public views on peace efforts, their key condition before resuming fitful talks with the government, the group said Tuesday.
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) chief negotiator Martin Ojul will Thursday lead the rebels’ first ever official delegation to their home country, during which they will also hold talks with President Yoweri Museveni.
The rebels are based in neighbouring eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and southern Sudan.
“The consultation exercises we are about to embark on marks a new milestone (in) participation by the people of Uganda in our collective effort to find lasting and attainable solutions to the political, social and economic problems in Uganda,” Ojul told reporters here.
The November 1 to December 13 consultations will also see the mobilisation of delegates to attend the first-ever convention since LRA leader Joseph Kony took over a two-year-old rebellion in northern Uganda in 1988.
The convention was earlier planned for October 15 in the jungles of southern Sudan but delayed by a funding shortfall.
On Monday, a government-LRA truce monitoring team arrived in Kampala to liaise with Ugandan security forces on the security of the insurgents’ delegation, officials said.
The LRA will visit all of Uganda — except the southern region — and concentrate on areas heavily ravaged by the conflict, described by the UN as one of the world’s most neglected crises.
The talks with the public will focus on comprehensive solutions to the conflict and matters of accountability and reconciliation, key gripes in the peace talks that are seen as the best chance to achieve stability.
Previous bids to discuss accountability at the peace talks were hampered by arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Kony and three top commanders. The ICC confirmed the Ugandan army in 2006 killed a fifth commander it had been seeking.
Northern Uganda elders have urged the ICC to drop charges in favour of traditional justice because Kony has vowed never to sign a final accord amid lingering arrest warrants.
The rebels will also send missions to Argentina, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Europe to study how reconciliatian is carried out without revenge. Analysts say the move is designed to convince the ICC to withdraw the warrants.
Human rights groups are pressing the ICC to also probe the Ugandan army, which is fiercely opposed to the move.
In August, donors delivered 7.7 million dollars, to be channeled through the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, to re-energise the peace talks, mediated by the semi-autonomous government of south Sudan.
Meanwhile, Ojur rejected Ugandan army claims that Kony and his deputy Vincent Otti were at odds, after the movement’s head of military operations Patrick Opiyo Makasi surrendered to DRC police this month.
Ugandan officials said Makasi would arrive in Kampala on Wednesday.
The conflict has left tens of thousands of people dead as well as 1.8 million displaced, out of a total population of 2.7 million in northern Uganda.
The LRA has been accused of committing atrocities including murder, rape, mutilations and mass abductions since it took leadership of a regional rebellion among northern Uganda’s ethnic Acholi minority in 1988.
(AFP)