Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Monday urged neighbouring states Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to help decimate insurgents from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that has waged a brutal war in the country’s northern region.
A day after threatening to redeploy Uganda’s military in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo if LRA rebels hiding there attacked his country, Museveni said the insurgents had already been driven from northern Uganda and southern Sudan.
”Remnants of them have now fled to the Garamba National Park of Congo. This area is under control of the United Nations and Kinshasa government. We should use the same cooperation to decimate this group,” Museveni told an Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) summit in Kenya.
Museveni said Uganda, DRC, the Khartoum government and the group in control of southern Sudan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, should work together ”to finish this problem once and for all”.
”Otherwise, these killers are using Congo now to kill people in southern Sudan in areas of Meridi and Yei,” he said.
On Sunday, the state-owned New Vision newspaper quoted Museveni as saying that he would redeploy soldiers ”with or without approval” in the eastern DRC to flush out the LRA insurgents if they attacked his country.
Kampala has long maintained that there are Ugandan groups holed up in the eastern DRC which pose a threat to its national security.
It used such claims to justify deployment of troops there and support DRC rebels during the vast central Africa nation’s 1998 to 2003 war.
Last week, the Ugandan army reported that LRA leader Joseph Kony had fled his hideaway in southern Sudan and joined his deputy Vincent Otti in Garamba National Park, which lies in the volatile eastern DRC.
For the past 20 years, the hardened LRA rebels have terrorised civilians in the region, where they are blamed for forcing nearly two million people out of their homes, in addition to abducting children to serve in combat and as sex slaves.
The Ugandan army has failed to vanquish the LRA insurgents, who took over the leadership of northern Uganda’s rebellion in 1988, two years into a conflict fuelled by perceived economic marginalisation of the region by Kampala.
The group distinguishes itself by its brutality and its total absence of a public political face, a characteristic that has made negotiating an end to the war near impossible. – Sapa-AFP