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| Africa Subsaharan | |
| Uganda: President Museveni urges rebel chief Kony to sign peace deal | |
| 2008-12-11 | |
| (SomaliNet) Saying the Lord's Resistance Army boss has been told all about plans to lift an international arrest warrant against him, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has urged fugitive rebel Joseph Kony to sign a final peace deal. LRA chief, Kony has demanded International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments for him and his top deputies be scrapped before they quit forest hideouts in northeastern Congo and end two decades of conflict that have destabilised a swathe of central Africa. "President Yoweri Museveni has urged...Kony to come out and sign the peace accord," Museveni's office said in a statement late on Monday. Uganda's government has pledged to ask the UN Security Council to suspend the ICC warrants after Kony lays down his arms. But the self-proclaimed prophet remains suspicious. Museveni ...
Uganda, Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) agreed in principle in June to launch joint military operations against the guerrillas if Kony did not sign. Experts say there would be no easy victory against battle-hardened LRA troops who are skilled at launching hit-and-run attacks on much larger, better-equipped forces. The DRC army is tied up fighting its own insurgents further south in the Kivu region, while UN peacekeepers in eastern Congo are overstretched and haunted by a botched raid on the LRA in 2006 that killed eight Guatemalan commandos. The chief mediator in Uganda's peace talks, south Sudan's vice-president Riek Machar, said there was now little appetite in Kampala or Kinshasa for a fresh assault on the rebels. "Kony is deep in the Congo...none of them really wanted to discuss any military action," he said in southern Sudan's capital Juba after returning from meetings in DRC and Uganda. "Generally they seemed to accept a policy of peaceful containment of the belligerency," he told reporters, adding Museveni would try to contact the LRA leader directly. Machar's talks were thrown into disarray in April when Kony refused to attend a signing ceremony on the remote south Sudan-Congo border. At a rare meeting with Ugandan elders in the area late last month, he again declined to ink the deal. This year Kony's fighters - notorious for mutilating survivors and kidnapping thousands of children - have also trekked north to attack villages in Central African Republic.- | |
| Posted by:Fred |