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Uganda: United Nations Prepares to Strike LRA
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The Monitor (Kampala)
25 April 2008
Posted to the web 24 April 2008
Grace Matsiko
Kampala
The UN mission in Congo, Monuc has said its troops are ready to strike the Lord's Resistance Army rebels in Garamba National Park should the rebel leader, Joseph Kony snub the South Sudan mediated peace process in the capital Juba.
Monuc is the UN peace keeping force in Congo. Monuc Head of Regional Relations Unit Gani Are told a meeting of security experts in Kampala on Tuesday, that UN peace keepers have set up a new base in Dungu, eastern DR Congo to handle the LRA.
"We have a military plan for the LRA, and are waiting for the Congolese army to say we need your help and we get in," Mr Gani said at the ongoing International Conference on Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), a grouping of 11 countries.
"We are preparing a logistic base in Dungu. We shall use it for surveillance and intelligence work and a force is currently deploying there," he added.
The LRA leader has been operating from Eastern DRC for the last two years. Reports indicated he shifted part of his base from Garamba into the Central African Republic.
This was before Kony delayed the signing of the final peace agreement with the government on April 10, citing financial and personal security.
Mr Gani, who presented a report to the experts about the project on disarmament of armed groups in Eastern DRC, said Monuc has an obligation to support the DRC army to rout the LRA and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) if talks fail.
"We are mandated by the Ngurdoto agreement and we are definitely preparing for it. The LRA falls within our mandate," Mr Gani said.
On September 9, 2007, President Yoweri Museveni and the DRC counterpart, Mr Joseph Kabila, signed a landmark agreement which compels Congo with support of the UN, to flush Kony out of Garamba within 90 days. The implementation of the agreement was however, put on hold due to the peace negotiations in Juba.
Though Mr Gani is the first UN official to sound a warning to the LRA since the talks failed about two weeks ago, Monuc's encounter with the rebels have in the past been disastrous. In 2006, the LRA killed eight Guatemalan peace keepers in an ambush in Aba, north of Bunia, the main town in Ituri District, Orientale province.
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Mr Gani said the Monucteam had increased intelligence and surveillance in Garamba. But the security experts from Uganda said as much as they do not distrust what Mr Gani told the meeting, there was a feeling among the affected communities that the UN lacked the will to fight the rebels.
The experts at the workshop on peace and security of the ICGLR are to come out with ways in which the member states can address the region's outstanding defence issues namely the small arms and light weapons proliferation, non-aggression and mutual defence protocol and demining.
Foreign affairs minister, Sam Kutesa on Tuesday appealed to the experts to use the meeting to find some of the solutions to the problems in the region.
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