Ugandan rebels desperate to end war – ambassador
By Daniel Wallis
KAMPALA, Sept 7 (Reuters) – Uganda’s brutal northern rebels are desperate to end their 18-year war in return for safety guarantees, a government official who held a rare meeting with Lord’s Resistance Army representatives said on Tuesday.
Joseph Ocwet, Uganda’s ambassador to the African Union, held brief talks last week with three men who said they represented the LRA and its elusive leader Joseph Kony, accused of leading an anti-government insurgency that has killed and maimed civilians and kidnapped tens of thousands of children for work as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.
The meeting at an abandoned primary school outside Gulu town, epicentre of the fighting that has forced more than 1.5 million people to flee their homes, was the first major contact between the rebels and the government of President Yoweri Museveni for 10 years, experts on the war say.
“They are really desperate. They have reached a point where they feel all they can do now is talk to the government. They don’t want to continue fighting,” Ocwet, a senior politician from northern Uganda, told Reuters in an interview.
But plans for a second meeting this week were put on hold by the rebels after Ugandan troops attacked an LRA group on Saturday, killing three fighters, including one of the junior commanders who met Ocwet.
“There was no way this was a deliberate attack to frustrate the current talks. It is just very unfortunate it happened at a time when they really want to talk,” Ocwet said.
He said he was waiting for the rebels to contact him again.
WILLING TO FORGIVE
The LRA rebellion began soon after Museveni, a southern guerrilla leader, seized power in 1986. Since then the group has become notorious for its brutality.
Operating mostly out of bases in lawless neighbouring southern Sudan, it has routinely targeted unarmed civilians, slicing off the lips and ears of its victims. Up to 100,000 people have been killed during the LRA’s 18-year war against the Kampala government.
The latest talks follow a devastating Ugandan raid in July on Kony’s suspected base camp near the Sudanese town of Juba that killed at least 120 people. Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet and former altar boy, slipped away.
The meeting was arranged by a northern Ugandan called Bosco Lapat who has acted as an intermediary in the past. Several senior figures in Uganda’s military distrust Lapat and the army has said it doubts the identity of the three men Ocwet met.
But Ocwet said he is confident the men were LRA fighters, and he said he attended the meeting with Museveni’s approval.
The rebels had not made any political or financial demands, and Ocwet said the main issue was senior LRA rebels trying to ensure their safety after the conflict ends.
Many lower ranking fighters had already benefited from a government amnesty offer, he said, but the war would grind on if Kony and his top commanders remained in the bush.
“That group of leaders feels they are the ones who are being seen as having committed atrocities, the ones that have led to all of these massacres and deaths and everything that has happened in the north,” he said.
“They still don’t believe they will be forgiven. They want to negotiate their fate, or to have assurances that if they come out they will be forgiven and not be prosecuted.”
The International Criminal Court is investigating massacres blamed on the LRA — more than 200 people were shot, hacked and burned to death in February during the worst recent attack — but Ocwet said he believed there was an important role for dialogue in ending the bloodshed.
“The strategy is either to kill these ringleaders, or capture them, or talk to them,” he said.
“But for me, I feel talking to them would be the best option. If it was about killing them, they would all have been killed by now, but they are very elusive…. They are really desperate to come out. It is the approach that matters now.”