Uganda says rebel leader Kony can return home after peace talks

Deutsche Presse Agentur
Published: Tuesday September 19, 2006

Kampala- One of the world's most wanted war crimes fugitives and the commander of an insurgency that has left thousands of people killed and maimed in northern Uganda will be free to return home once a peace agreement to end his 20-year rebellion is signed, Ugandan government officials said Tuesday. The officials, however, told a news conference that the fate of Joseph Kony, a former peasant in his late 40s who is sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for trial for war crimes committed by his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), will be discussed during the final days of the two-month-long peace negotiations going on in the southern Sudan town of Juba.

The Ugandan government has avoided the ICC call for it to arrest Kony and his four top commanders and said that instead it will use the tribal system of justice that focuses of repentence, reconciliation and forgiveness once the rebels gather in two named places in southern Sudan under the current partial ceasefire agreement signed three weeks ago.

"Kony is free to come back and settle anywhere in Uganda. Kony and his fighters who give up the rebellion will be free. However, we cannot dictate where Kony will be, but once we finish up the first items on the agenda of the talks, we will discuss where Kony will want to be. It will be him to tell us where he wants to be," the leader of the government peace team, Ruhakana Rugunda, told journalists.

The guerilla leader is currently holed up in a forest base in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo where he fled early this year after being forced out of his former Sudan bases.

Newspaper reports earlier said that the elusive rebel leader had requested political asylum in the Central African Republic, but the report was not confirmed by the LRA leadership.

Fighters from the cult-like rebel army killed and mutilated thousands of civilians during the war and kidnapped thousands of children to become fighters or sex slaves. The 20-year civil war also nearly 2 million people from their homes.

The ceasefire agreement allows the LRA to gather in two assembly places in Sudan for screening and future resettlement as the talks proceed, but although hundreds of the rebels and their captives have already gathered, Kony and his top commanders have not left their Congo bases.

The September 19 deadline by which the LRA was supposed to have moved into the assembly places has been extended and a new timetable will be announced when the government team meets the LRA delegation and the Sudanese mediators in Juba next week, Rugunda said.

© 2006 DPA - Deutsche Presse-Agenteur