Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) on Monday said it will resume peace talks with the government, but sought a break to mourn its third-in-command, killed by the army over the weekend, officials said.
The government welcomed the decision by the rebels, who last Wednesday stormed out of the talks being held in southern Sudan, demanding the government join it in declaring a unilateral ceasefire.
But it urged them ”to be serious” and warned those still in the bush to take advantage of the state-granted amnesty and surrender or also be killed.
”We have agreed to continue with the peace talks. We do not want to be blamed if the talks collapse, but we know the Ugandan government wants the talks to fail,” rebel spokesperson Obonyo Olweny told Agence France-Presse.
The agreement came a day after Kampala said the army had killed war-crimes fugitive and LRA third-in-command Raska Lukwiya in a battle on Saturday that took place after his fighters ambushed and killed a government soldier in the conflict-wracked northern Kitgum district.
”We are going to ask the mediator to give us three days to mourn our fallen hero,” said Olweny.
Junior Foreign Minister Okello Oryem also told the insurgents the government would not comply with International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants and hand them over.
”What the LRA should do is advise their commanders on the ground to take advantage of the amnesty and report to the amnesty commission, get a certificate and go home. What is ICC to us? We will not arrest them and the government will defend them through thick and thin,” he said.
”If they do not accept they will all die,” he said, explaining that Lukwiya could have been spared had he heeded the amnesty offer.
The government has maintained that the current talks are the most credible of the many past efforts to end nearly two decades of fighting that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced two million people.
”I am not surprised that they [the rebels] are back. The most important thing is that the LRA should be serious with the talks.
We should work expeditiously on the agenda and the peace talks, then sign agreements,” Oryem, also a delegate to the talks, said.
”They know that the 24-million people in Uganda want peace and when they walked away from the talks, they were doing it at their own peril,” he added.
Last October, the ICC issued arrest warrants against elusive LRA supremo Joseph Kony and his four commanders, including Lukwiya, who are seeking a peaceful settlement to northern Uganda’s brutal two-decade conflict.
The other LRA leaders indicted by the ICC are Kony’s deputy Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen.
The fugitives stand accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the LRA, which has since 1988 acquired a reputation for abductions, rape and terrorising hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes in a war against President Yoweri Museveni’s government.
Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet and mystic, claims to be fighting to replace Museveni’s government with one based on the Biblical Ten Commandments.
But his rebel group has become better known for atrocities, particularly the kidnapping of an estimated 25 000 children — girls for sex slaves and boys for fighters. — Sapa-AFP