Museveni gives Joseph Kony final peace offer

May 16, 2006

President Yoweri Museveni has given LRA leader Joseph Kony another chance to renounce rebellion and guaranteed his safety.

By Henry Mukasa

President Yoweri Museveni has given LRA leader Joseph Kony another chance to renounce rebellion and guaranteed his safety.

A statement from State House said the Government and that of southern Sudan had given Kony a new ultimatum of 60 days of up to July this year “to peacefully end terrorism.”

Museveni said during a meeting with the British Overseas Development minister, Hillary Benn, at State House Nakasero yesterday that he reached the agreement with the president of Southern Sudan, Salva Kiir, during a May 13 meeting in Kampala. Kiir is Sudan’s vice-president.

The statement said the offer would soon be delivered to Kony by Southern Sudan vice-president Riek Machar, who recently reportedly met Kony.

“President Museveni told the British minister that if Kony did not take the latest peace offer, Kiir and he agreed that the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army and the UPDF would jointly handle him militarily,” said the statement.

It added: “The President said much as Kony and four of his cohorts had been indicted by the International Criminal Court, if he got serious about a peaceful settlement, the Government of Uganda would guarantee him safety.”

Museveni and Benn discussed Uganda’s democratisation in the multiparty era, the treason trial of Dr. Kizza Besigye, which Museveni said would not be reverted to a military court and commitment to rout out corruption.

The President said the mainstay of his anti-corruption strategy would be identifying young people of integrity to take over the money-controlling departments of government, as it happened with tax body, the URA.

“My young people are coming up; we are going to sweep away this garbage of corruption,” he said.

Museveni said Kony, now holed up in the DR Congo’s Ngaramba National Park, had no military chance to topple his government “because the army has the capacity to deal with him promptly.”

“He cannot come back here; if he does, he dies,” Museveni said.

He urged Britain and other UN Security Council permanent members to prevail on the UN peacekeeping force in the Congo (MONUC) to stop Kony and other terrorists from having a “holiday.”

Benn, who had just returned from the north where he visited Padibe IDP camp in Kitgum, said the situation had “clearly got better.”

He told Reuters that although security had improved, the civil war was now a regional problem needing action from Uganda’s neighbours.

“The LRA are a very difficult group of people to deal with and they represent a threat now not only in northern Uganda,” Benn said after meeting formerly abducted women.

He added, “When you hear the stories of the unimaginable horror they have been through, I think we all reflect on what more might have been done in the past to try and deal with the problem.”

On the suffering of the northern people, Museveni said, “We are going to spend money; the north will be reconstructed.”

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