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The Monitor (Kampala)February 3, 2004
Posted to the web February 3, 2004
Badru D. Mulumba
Kampala Religious leaders in Acholi take their campaign for a peaceful settlement to the rebel insurgency in northern Uganda to London today.The debate is one of the major highlights of a global tour by the clergy seeking to drum up support for the 18-year-old rebellion, which has left an estimated 30,000 people dead and displaced more than a million.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), a British Foreign Office think tank for the analysis of international issues, has organised the debate in conjunction with Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Yesterday, Ms Liz Horn, the Africa programme co-ordinator at RIIA said: "His Grace Archbishop Odama is leading a six-person delegation to the UK in an effort to increase awareness about the war in northern Uganda and to appeal to the international community to assume a more active and positive role working towards [the] expeditious resolution of the conflict through meaningful dialogue."
In an invitational email, Horn said that the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative chairman Archbishop J.B. Odama, and Mr Chris Dolan, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, will be the speakers.
RIIA lists its mission as helping individuals and organisations to be at the forefront of developments in an ever-changing and increasingly complex world.It works to stimulate debate and research on political, business, security and other key issues in the international arena, according to its web page.
Its views are said to contribute to British foreign policy.Its presidents are Lord Douglas Hurd, the UK foreign secretary from 1989 to 1995, Lord George Robertson, the secretary general of NATO from 1999 to 2003, and Baroness Shirley Williams, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the U.K House of Lords.Horn told The Monitor that this is the first meeting on the conflict in northern Uganda.
She said that 85 participants are expected.The Monitor could not immediately establish members of Odama's delegation.
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"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister
