UGANDA: Army rejects reported rebel offer for talks

KAMPALA, 30 March 2004 (IRIN) - The Ugandan army has nipped in the bud a move by Joseph Kony, the leader of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), suggesting that he wants to open up the way for peace talks towards ending the country's 18-year-long war. The army said the offer was insincere. Kony is alleged by the army to have ordered his spokesman, Sam Kolo, to seek contact with the government for peace talks to end the conflict that has devastated northern and parts of eastern Uganda, displacing nearly 1.5 million people. "We are rejecting his offer," the army spokesman, Maj Shaban Bantariza, told IRIN by telephone on Tuesday. "These are insincere efforts whose aim is to deceive those who are weak-minded - to deceive those who do not know Kony's history." "He has come under intense pressure from our forces in Sudan", he added, "and he wants to tell lies that he wants peace talks in order to get a breathing space." Bantariza told IRIN that Kony had also ordered his troops to stop attacking camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) because "too many of his men were being lost in the attacks and ensuing pursuits by the army". Efforts to hold peace talks between the LRA and the government, which were organised by the Gulu based Acholi Religious Leaders' Peace Initiative (ARLPI) at the start of 2003, collapsed at the end of March that year after the rebels failed to turn up for the talks. The government says this was because the rebels were never interested in peace. But ARLPI members accused the army of breaking the limited ceasefire on several occasions with the intention of using it to contain the rebels and then ambush them. This, they said, devastated what little trust that ARLPI had managed to establish. In a speech on Saturday during a remembrance service for the 300 or so IDPs killed by the rebels at Barlonyo on 21 February, President Yoweri Museveni vowed to avenge the victims of LRA atrocities.