allAfrica.com                                                                               *


LRA Completes Consultations On Reconciliation


The Monitor (Kampala)


NEWS
10 December 2007
Posted to the web 10 December 2007

By Samuel Egadu
Gulu

THE Lords Resistance Army, peace delegation has completed a one-month long
consultations on Agenda Number Three on accountability and reconciliation, the
rebel's lead negotiator announced yesterday .

Martin Ojul said their consultations that started in the country on November 6
in Gulu in northern Uganda, successfully ended on Saturday in Masindi with the
majority of participants calling for the withdrawal of arrest warrants issued
by The Hague based International Criminal court on the top LRA commanders.



The LRA leader, Joseph Kony, his former deputy, Vincent Otti whose fate is
still unknown, Domenic Ogwen and Okot Odhiambo, now LRA second in command, were
indicted by ICC for war crimes and crime against humanity.

The LRA commanders face 33 counts that include murder, rape, sexual
enslavement, abduction, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers as
guerilla fighters.

"We have finished with our consultations in Uganda. We had our last
consultation meeting here in Masindi yesterday (Saturday)," Ojul told Daily
Monitor in a phone interview from Masindi yesterday.

"Wherever we have gone for consultations, people are seeing ICC as the
stumbling block to the peace process.

They are asking the ICC to withdraw the arrests warrants issued against the top
LRA commanders," he said adding, "They want the indicted commanders to be tried
using the traditional mechanisms,"

The delegation has been traversing the whole country consulting the war victims
and other stakeholders on which alternative mechanisms to deal with
accountability and reconciliations, the third agenda of the five agenda item of
the South Sudan mediated peace talks, which deals with the local traditional
justice systems, which seems to sideline the International Criminal Court, ICC.

The government delegation headed by Dr Ruhakana Rugunda complete the similar
exercise in August with similar views of people wanting ICC to drop the arrests
warrants issued against LRA commanders.


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