South Sudan probes fate of LRA missed leader
November 8, 2007 (NAIROBI) — Southern Sudan authorities have sent a team to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to investigate the fate of a missing Ugandan rebel chief, an official said Thursday.
The team left Wednesday to visit areas where Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leaders had camped to determine the fate of its second-in-command Vincent Otti, said the top south Sudan official on condition of anonymity.
Ugandan newspapers claimed Wednesday that LRA supremo Joseph Kony killed his deputy last month, but the movement’s top negotiator Martin Ojul denied the reports.
“We sent a team out there to determine the fate of Otti is missing,” said a top official from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), which governs the semi-autonomous region of southern Sudan.
The SPLM said initial reports indicate Otti was suffering from cholera after an outbreak hit a rebel hideout in Garamba park, but the team is yet to meet the elusive rebel leader and confirm his status.
“The information we got is that there was an outbreak of cholera in the LRA camp and it affected a lot of people. The LRA people told the team we sent that Otti was very sick of cholera, but he was not dead yet,” the official said.
“But since this is a rebel movement whose operations are not open to be public, our team will continue carrying out investigations,” the official told AFP by satellite phone from Sudan’s Western Equatoria region.
The SPLM has had regular contact with LRA leaders hiding in southern Sudan and northeastern regions of the neighbouring DRC.
The 61-year-old Otti’s whereabouts have been unknown since last month after rival LRA factions clashed over the line to adopt in peace talks with the Ugandan government aimed at ending two decades of insurgency.
In 2005, the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted five LRA leaders, including Kony and Otti, on a raft of charges such as murder, rape and enslavement of children.
Otti alone faces 21 counts of war crimes and 11 of crimes against humanity.
Since the LRA took over a two-year-old rebellion in northern Uganda in 1988, its operations have been shrouded in secrecy, with Kony and Otti appearing in public for the first time in 2006.
Aid workers have said that disease outbreaks in rebel camps have contributed to depleting LRA ranks in the course of the conflict, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced up to 1.8 million people.