Uganda said on Thursday it will organise a trip next week for relatives of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, including LRA supremo Joseph Kony’s mother, to visit their kin at a jungle hideout.
As peace talks between the government and the LRA continue in the southern Sudanese capital of Juba in a bid to end northern Uganda’s brutal, two-decade war, Kampala said it has agreed to a rebel request to arrange the meeting.
”Joseph Kony has asked to meet his mother and other commanders want to see their relatives and we are arranging this,” Ugandan delegation spokesperson Paddy Ankunda said from Juba.
”Though decisions taken at the peace talks will be done by the LRA delegation, we think that efforts of the relatives could be supplementary,” he said. ”This is a confidence-building measure.”
The elusive Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet and mystic, and the senior LRA leadership are now camped out in the jungles of the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), near the border with southern Sudan.
Ankunda said the delegation, expected to make the trip on July 25, will comprise about 40 people, including the rebels’ families, religious leaders from northern Uganda and from Kony’s ethnic minority Acholi tribe.
The visit will be led by Riek Machar, the vice-president of autonomous southern Sudan who is the lead mediator in the talks and has made several previous trips to see LRA leaders on the border.
Last week, Kony said through his deputy that he wanted to meet Acholi elders because he was fighting for their cause.
According to Uganda’s state-run New Vision newspaper, Kony’s mother lives in Kampala alongside a dozen other relatives, including the rebel leader’s brother, under the care of President Yoweri Museveni.
The Juba talks opened last week and have continued despite rows between the two sides over their various initial positions.
The LRA has demanded the dissolution of the government army and compensation for alleged damages, which Kampala has rejected, and the government has ruled out the rebels’ insistence that a ceasefire deal precede a formal peace pact.
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.
Kony and four of his top lieutenants have been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and are not attending the Juba talks, despite Kampala’s desire for rebel representation at the highest level. — Sapa-AFP