UN official wants LRA leaders punished

GENEVA - Leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) must be brought to justice for carrying out attacks in neighbouring Sudan and Congo, a top UN human rights official said yesterday.

Launching two reports on investigations into assaults on civilians, including babies, in the past year in the two countries, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said it was critical that LRA leaders be tried in the international court for what may be crimes against humanity.

"The brutality employed during the attacks was consistent, deliberate and egregious," she said.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague in 2005 issued war crimes warrants for LRA leader Joseph Kony and other senior LRA commanders, but they remain in hiding.

Both reports, produced by Pillay's office, called for cooperation with the ICC, including from governments in the region, in the arrest and surrender the LRA leaders.

"The attacks have left a legacy of trauma, both individual and collective, and those affected continue to live in fear of their lives," Pillay said, stressing that security forces in Congo were ill-equipped to protect civilians from roving bands of the LRA.

In the report on Congo, a producer of gold, coffee, sugar and palm oil, investigators detailed synchronised LRA attacks, mutilations and rapes that killed at least 1,200 people between September 2008 and June 2009.

The UN peacekeeping force has put its soldiers on high alert after reports that LRA rebels threatened to carry out mass killings like those they conducted last Christmas, when hundreds of civilians were slaughtered.

The report on Sudan covers attacks between December 2008 and March 2009, during which at least 81 civilians in the country's south were killed, with others including children and infants injured, mutilated, raped and abducted.

Graphic accounts included testimony from a Sudanese man who found the mutilated body of a fellow villager whose leg had been severed, jaw dislocated and teeth pulled out.