Ugandan rebels have killed 23 people including 14 south Sudanese soldiers and "started war", a south Sudanese minister said on Saturday.
Wednesday's raid by Lord's Resistance Army guerrillas at Nabanga village on the remote Congo border appeared to signal the collapse of peace talks with the Ugandan government that have been hosted by south Sudan since mid-2006. "The LRA have started war," south Sudan's Information Minister Gabriel Changson Chang told Reuters in Juba. "Southern Sudan will not be the place where they can wage this war."
Chang said his government would decide how to respond. "We do not yet have a definite position on this," he said.
Nabanga had been the site of tentative meetings between Ugandan officials and the LRA's fugitive leader Joseph Kony, who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
But he failed to appear in April to sign a final deal to end more than two decades of civil war in northern Uganda that have killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 2 million more.
|