Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) on Tuesday decried a government move to bring mutilated war victims to peace talks in southern Sudan, suggesting it is a propaganda stunt.
LRA spokesperson Obonyo Olweny said there is no point in having disfigured people — some of whom have had their lips, ears and noses cut off, allegedly by the rebels — at the peace talks in the southern Sudanese capital of Juba.
”We don’t understand why they would bring these mutilated people here,” he told Agence France-Presse by phone from Juba, where the negotiations are to resume later this week. ”For what purpose? Why do they bring such people? Who did this to them? We don’t know,” Olweny said.
The rebels have denied charges of committing widespread atrocities against civilians, for which its top leaders have been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court and instead blamed government troops for them.
Olweny’s comments came after Interior Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, the leader of Kampala’s delegation to the talks, brought a pair of war victims, both of whom claim to have been attacked by the LRA, to Juba for the negotiations.
Paddy Ankunda, the spokesperson for the government team, said the two — a man whose right arm had been lopped off and a woman whose lips were hacked away — were in Juba at the request of observers to the talks.
He insisted their presence is intended only to remind the LRA that true reconciliation is possible as they try to negotiate a settlement to the brutal, nearly 20-year war.
”It is to reassure the LRA that despite the fact they meted out atrocities against the community, the people are willing to forgive them,” Ankunda said. ”It’s part of the accountability and reconciliation process.”
After a landmark truce took effect on August 29, the talks are due to resume this week, with the two sides taking up matters of security, reconciliation and development.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and about 1,7-million displaced by the nearly two-decade conflict in northern Uganda, which is regularly cited as one of the world’s worst and most-forgotten humanitarian crises. — Sapa-AFP