The Ugandan government on Wednesday flatly rejected demands for a truce from the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and said there could be no ceasefire until a full peace settlement is reached.
Just a day after peace talks began under Sudanese mediation in the capital of autonomous southern Sudan, Kampala’s delegation took a hard line against a raft of proposals from the LRA’s negotiators.
The Ugandan team rejected LRA demands for the dissolution of the national army, compensation for alleged atrocities committed against them and the disbandment of camps in northern Uganda housing about two million people.
”We do accept the principle of cessation of hostilities. However, we think its signing should take place at the end of the peace talks,” Deputy Ugandan Foreign Minister Okello Oryem, a delegate at the talks, told Agence France-Presse.
”This is because in the past when the government declared a truce, the LRA took the opportunity to regroup, collect more weapons, recruit soldiers and expand its network. The LRA is very much aware of its conduct.
”We must negotiate and sign everything as a complete package. We do not want to sign piecemeal agreements,” he said.
LRA delegation spokesperson Obonyo Olweny has said the rebels were keen to secure at least a temporary truce to allow them to make more contact with their supporters among the Acholi ethnic minority in northern Uganda.
Oryem said the government also would not disband the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), which the rebels claim is loyal to President Yoweri Museveni and not to the nation.
”We totally and categorically reject calls to disband the UPDF.
The UPDF is a professional, disciplined army that is composed of every single Ugandan tribe and therefore it is free from any tribalism and nepotism,” he said.
”We will not even consider or imagine disbanding it.”
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and about two million displaced in northern Uganda since the LRA took over as leader of a regional rebellion among the Acholi people in 1988.
The peace talks in Juba are seen by many as the best chance to end the civil war, which is regularly described by aid agencies as one of the world’s worst and most-forgotten humanitarian crises.
But they have started shakily after the LRA refused to include any senior leaders in their negotiating team, fearing they would be arrested on war-crimes charges.
The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet and mystic. He says he is fighting for the Acholi to oust Museveni and replace his government with one based on the Biblical 10 Commandments.
His group is considered a terrorist organisation by the Ugandan authorities. — Sapa-AFP