Ugandan rebel leader reveals all in interview
By Frank Nyakairu , The Monitor
KAMPALA, April 15, 2004 — The reclusive LRA rebel leader Joseph Kony has given his first-ever interview and announced he might be relocating to Ethiopia.
The interview is published in the latest edition of The Referendum, a weekly magazine run by exiles from southern Sudan based in Kenya.
In the interview, Kony speaks of his fear and suspicion of President Museveni and plans to establish a regime based on the biblical Ten Commandments.
The rebel leader also reveals plans to relocate his rebel group from southern Sudan to Ethiopia, in the light of an impending peace deal between the SPLA and the Sudanese government.
“I am considering other options due to some – expected events from the Sudanese lords,” Kony says in the interview.
“I have been invited by some lords in Oromo lands in Ethiopia and I will go there soon,” he told The Referendum magazine.
Kony, who has always received support from the Khartoum government in retaliation for Kampala’s support for the SPLA, has since fallen out of favour as an internationally brokered peace deal takes shape in southern Sudan.
Aware of the precarious situation such a deal would put him in, Kony says in the interview: “I want to tell the Sudanese lords to keep away from us because if they attack us as they have done it this month (March 2004), we will fight and set their villages on fires.”
Kony says his Lord’s Resistance Army, which has been blamed for the rape, murder and abduction in the north, said the group “is fighting for the application of Ten Commandments of God and we are also fighting to liberate people living in occupied Northern Uganda.”
The magazine says the interview was conducted on March 6 in Sudan’s second largest city of Juba.
The interviewer, who is not named, is described as a former bodyguard of the rebel leader.
He admits to receiving support from Sudan and visiting Khartoum four times since 1997.
Asked why he did not hold peace talks with government, Kony revealed his distrust of the President.
“President Museveni cannot talk peace, he is killer and he wanted to kill me by all means. I have asked the lords of the LRA to kill Museveni,” Kony said.
The chief of Military Intelligence, Col. Noble Mayombo, later told The Monitor that Kony could run but could not hide.
“He is an international criminal; we can get him anywhere he goes even if it means signing a protocol with Ethiopia we shall,” Mayombo said.
The acting Presidential Press Secretary, Mr Onapito Ekomoloit, rejected Kony’s claims against Mr Museveni.
“That is absolute nonsense and an insult to Acholi people. Kony has been butchering innocent Acholi people systematically and we have systematically been trying to defend them,” Onapito said by telephone.