Sudan says Uganda rebels kill troops and start "war"
Pastor Dale Morgan
Sudan says Uganda rebels kill troops and start "war"*
Reuters
JUBA, Sudan - Ugandan rebels have killed 23 people including 14 south
Sudanese soldiers and "started war", a south Sudanese minister said on
Saturday.
Wednesday's raid by Lord's Resistance Army guerrillas at Nabanga village
on the remote Congo border appeared to signal the collapse of peace
talks with the Ugandan government that have been hosted by south Sudan
since mid-2006.
"The LRA have started war," south Sudan's Information Minister Gabriel
Changson Chang told Reuters in Juba. "Southern Sudan will not be the
place where they can wage this war."
Chang said his government would decide how to respond. "We do not yet
have a definite position on this," he said.
Nabanga had been the site of tentative meetings between Ugandan
officials and the LRA's fugitive leader Joseph Kony, who is wanted for
war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
But he failed to appear in April to sign a final deal to end more than
two decades of civil war in northern Uganda that have killed tens of
thousands of people and displaced 2 million more.
On Thursday, a Ugandan military spokesman said Uganda, the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Sudan would launch a joint offensive against the
LRA if Kony failed to commit to talks.
"RECRUIT, ABDUCT, REARM"
Major Paddy Ankunda, the Ugandan spokesman, said the elusive rebel
commander had shown he had no interest in negotiations.
"As usual, Kony has used the peace process to recruit, abduct and rearm
himself to fight on," Ankunda said this week.
He said agreement on the need for a multi-national operation was reached
at a regional security meeting in Kampala on Tuesday. It would be led by
the DRC government with the support of a U.N. peacekeeping force based
in eastern Congo, he said.
Kampala says the United States has pledged its support too.
Kony is thought to move between camps in lawless northeastern DRC's
Garamba Forest and Central African Republic, security experts say. The
guerrillas have also used bases in neighbouring southern Sudan in the past.
Aid workers say his forces have raided villages and abducted hundreds of
civilians in the three countries in recent months.
Kony and two of his deputies are wanted by the ICC in The Hague for
crimes including massacres, rapes and the kidnapping of children as sex
slaves and fighters in their insurgency.
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