'Starve rebels into peace talks'

2008-09-30 11:08

Kampala - Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) should be starved into accepting peace negotiations, a Ugandan minister said on Tuesday, accusing some aid groups of sending the rebel group food aid.

"The LRA would not be surviving if nobody was sending them food," Minister for Disaster Preparedness Tarsis Kabwegyere told AFP.

"Somebody somewhere is sending food to those rebels. They send food, they send money, and the LRA get stronger and keep kidnapping children."

Kabwegyere declined to clearly identify the LRA's alleged support, but said the leaders of some non-governmental aid organisations had been sending the rebels food in their forest hide-outs in neighbouring countries.

He also said the governments of Uganda, the semi-autonomous government of South Sudan and the UN should stop offering LRA leader Joseph Kony material incentives for participating in negotiations.

The minister charged that the LRA had tricked some members of the international community into believing they wanted peace in order to access food, medicine and other supplies.

"As far as I'm concerned, perpetuating their existence is totally ungodly, therefore anybody who continues facilitating them is working contrary to humanitarian interests," he added.

"We should let the rebels starve so that everybody knows that we are serious about the peace talks," he said.

Peace talks sponsored by Sudan and the UN halted in April when Kony refused to sign a peace accord, because of the outstanding arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes.

Since then Kony has on multiple occasions failed to show up for continued negotiations, despite initially agreeing to appear.

Last week, the UN children's fund (Unicef) urged the immediate release of 90 children kidnapped in the Democratic Republic of Congo by LRA rebels.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the two-decade-old civil war between the LRA and the Ugandan government.

- AFP