Badru Mulumba
15 April 2008
Juba — An hour before he announced to the world that he had resigned as a the head of the Uganda rebel group delegation to the peace talks, David Matsanga sat - deserted and ignored -- on a bed, inside a tent.
The eyes of the man, who a few hours ago posed as the leader of the delegation of the Lord's Resistance Army, were bloodshot and teary.
Outside, word spread like wild fire around the campsite, erected on soggy ground at the edges of the Garamba National Park, right across from the Sudan-Congo border, according to the Global Positioning System.
While the rest of the rebel negotiating team stayed behind in Ri-Kwangba at the edge of the Congo, Dr Matsanga had been let go, and he returned to the campsite just like any other commoner.
"Kony has not broken off with me," Dr Matsanga says. "I just came here to think." He denied that he was sacked. And to make it clear he was still a man in charge, he loaded airtime on the satellite phone, dialed a number, and read out the numbers on the satellite phone.
"I am sending you some airtime so that number one can call me," said Dr Matsanga. On the morning of April 11, 12 hours after he announced his resignation, Dr Matsanga again picked his phone. This time it was to answer an incoming call.
On the phone, Dr Matsanga name-dropped, and the way he did it, it was - just like the night before - for the benefit of the people around him.
Next to him was Okello Oryem, Uganda's junior minister for Foreign Affairs, and Dr Ruhakana Rugunda, Internal Affairs Minister and leader of the Ugandan negotiating team.
During both calls, Matsanga was most likely putting a message across.
The night before that he was still in touch with Kony, and Kony couldn't call him because he lacked airtime.
And this morning to convey the message that Kony was desperately trying to reach him after his resignation but he was not interested. Dr Matsanga, obviously had not spoken to Kony for days - some say, dating back to the time the rebel leader agreed to sign the peace agreement on April 10.
And today, on the April 10 day that Kony was meant to sign the peace treaty, he had declined to speak to Matsanga. The always laughing David Matsanga had re-emerged. He apologized for lies such as saying that Kony's deputy, David Otti, was alive.
"I covered that up," Matsanga says. "I went around the world telling everyone that Otti was alive. That's my job as a PR man. It was not meant to lie to the world, but it was meant to bring peace to our country."
The apology came too short too little, but it reveals the spin and counter-spin, information and disinformation - and from both sides - on which the talks have been founded since they started two years ago.
And now, the international community still wonders why the signing ceremony collapsed. The two sides don't seem to have seen it.
The LRA delegation seemed to have been taken by surprise. The latest signing ceremony for the peace agreement between the Ugandan government and the LRA was a failure of enormous proportions.
"We did not really expect to sign an agreement today," one diplomat said. "We expected that it would be a day or two later."The failure of the talks leaves more questions than answers.
But one thing is clear: this is the tragic tale of a man who wanted to deliver a peace agreement - probably for his own political future, and men who fought him because he shoved them aside in the process of claiming all the glamour and anything to come out of a peace deal.
What is emerging is that a PR man is good for the public image, but perhaps bad for a sensitive issue such as peace talks, which require a problem-solver, such as an economist.
At the talks, Dr Matsanga was not merely negotiating peace; he was selling himself. Consensus was that Dr Matsanga wanted a deal fast to boost his resume - and he believed that he was the only man who could convince Kony to sign the deal.
Indeed, money played a big role in the collapse in the first collapse of the signing on April 3. The rebel delegation said the place did not have facilities on the ground.
The facilities there on April 10 where the facilities in the area when the signing was first postponed, except for the chairs and tables. So the April 3 extension was not because of facilities. It was about money.
If some delegates told Kony that other people were enriching themselves - true or false -- while he should be the one getting rich, then one would expect the mistrust to keep growing.
Is it possible that since a golden handshake was not forthcoming, some people figured it useless, and advised Kony not to sign a deal.
The last time the rebel delegation requested money, it was fired. This time, if the rebels wanted money, they wouldn't say so openly.
Then, there was Riek Machar, Southern Sudan Vice President and Chief Mediator to the talks who overly trusted the negotiating teams to do what was right. For no omission of his own, Machar dealt with the principals to the agreement through third terms. That was no problem. Machar gave the principals too much freedom to the extent that he did not know when there was a lie and when there was not.
But in the aftermath of the failure to sign an agreement, much has been said of the division and infighting within the LRA as a reason for the non appearance of Kony at the signing ceremony. The international community thinks this. The mediator thinks this. And the former head of the LRA negotiating team says so.
Why? Because however one looks at it, the LRA is at its demise point, and far away removed from Uganda to cause any havoc out of desperation. The rebel group has been slowly dying since the peace talks began and it moved farther and farther away from northern Uganda--its recruiting ground.
At this stage, the Uganda government would rather do without an agreement with Kony. For, if it signs an agreement with Kony, it still has to deal with him. If it allows the International Criminal Court to take him, it deals with an even worse issue: investigations of atrocities from the government side. But if the Ugandan government lets Kony die a slow death without an agreement, all this goes away.
It's easy to rule this off as another excuse. But from listening to the parties to the agreement, its clear there's a big problem with the section on justice and accountability.But Okello's own interpretation differs from the LRA lawyer's interpretation.
Complaints over money aside, differences over the interpretation of the agreement seem to have provided rich ground for intrigue.
Did the Uganda government expect Kony to sign an agreement and be tried under a system where the maximum punishment - death - is worse than that from the ICC - life imprisonment?
"That's speculation from spoilers, which you are repeating here, which is unfortunate," retorts Okello. In that sentence, one learns that there probably are people itching to spoil the agreement.
"There are people telling him, It's a bad deal, let's not do it," says a consultant to the rebel delegation. "There's also some element of jealousy: they are people who want to be the ones to do it. It's about power: why not me?"
The lead negotiator for the LRA had played a central role in shunting aside everybody else from Kony. And when he, too, was shunted aside, there was nobody else to save the talks.
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