Sudan talks could ease northern Uganda crisis – UN

By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 21 (Reuters) – A senior U.N. official said on Thursday he hoped the peace process in southern Sudan would help end a long reign of terror by a Ugandan sect that kidnaps children to torture them and turn them into soldiers.

“We hope that … we are now seeing a beginning of an end to this endless litany of horrors where children are the fighters and the victims in northern Uganda,” U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said.

“We hope to see an end because there is more international attention and there is a peace process in Sudan which can have a positive spillover, because the war in Sudan had a negative spillover earlier on the conflict in northern Uganda,” Egeland told reporters.

The Lord’s Resistance Army, a religious sect led by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, has been terrorizing northern Uganda for nearly a decade, kidnapping children and taking them to camps in southern Sudan where they are forced to become fighters and sex slaves.

Sudan has had a running border feud with Uganda and has armed rebels seeking to seize power in Kampala. Peace talks to end Sudan’s southern civil war are being held in the Kenyan town of Naivasha and U.N. officials say an agreement seems within reach by the end of the year.

The northern Ugandan sect has kidnapped some 20,000 children over the years, and the resulting insecurity in the region has forced some 1.8 million to flee their homes, spurring a crisis that Egeland calls the world’s most neglected humanitarian emergency.

To end it, world governments must pay more attention to the crisis, provide more aid and put more pressure on the parties to end the killing, disarm the child soldiers and help re-integrate them into society, he said.