Ugandan government officials met overnight with the elusive Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony ahead of the resumption of peace talks aimed at ending a 19-year-old insurgency, officials said on Monday.
The spokesperson for the Ugandan delegation to the peace talks said Walter Ochora, a district commissioner for northern Uganda’s Gulu District, met the rebel supremo in Nabanga, a small trading post along the southern Sudan-Democratic Republic of Congo border.
”We know that Kony met with Ochola last night. We shall get details of their discussion later,” spokesperson Paddy Ankunda told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Kampala.
In 1994, Kony held face-to-face talks with Betty Bigombe, who was the minister in charge of northern Uganda. Since then, Bogombe, who later became a peace mediator, made several failed attempts to launch peace talks.
The Nabanga meeting came as both sides prepared to resume talks mediated by Riak Machar, the vice-president of the semi-autonomous region of southern Sudan, to end the bloody conflict, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced about two million people.
LRA spokesperson Obonyo Olweny told AFP the delegates were scheduled to meet traditional and religious elders who will ”actively participate in the reconciliation and confidence-building phase of the talks”.
The 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.
The negotiations, which opened on July 14, started shakily after the LRA refused to include any senior leaders in their negotiating team, fearing they would be arrested on international war-crimes charges.
The LRA’s self-proclaimed prophet and mystic Kony says he is fighting for the Acholi to oust Museveni and replace his government with one based on the biblical Ten Commandments.
His group is considered a terrorist organisation by the Ugandan authorities. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Kony and four of his top commanders. — Sapa-AFP