INTERVIEW-Ugandan ex-bishop urges talks with rebels
By Gideon Long
LONDON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - The Ugandan government should stop trying to crush rebels who have wreaked havoc across the north of the country and open peace talks with them instead, an Anglican leader from the region said on Friday.
Without negotiations, the rebels will continue to abduct children to use as soldiers and sex slaves and to terrorise villagers, he said.
"When two elephants fight one another, it is always the grass which gets trampled," said Macleord Baker Ochola, former bishop of the Ugandan district of Kitgum.
"It is the innocent people in the middle who suffer," said Baker Ochola, vice-chairman of the Acholi Religious Leaders' Peace Initiative (ARLPI), which is trying to broker an end to the 17-year conflict in northern Uganda.
The United Nations has described the conflict as the worst in the violent history of northern Uganda.
It has escalated since the government launched its "Iron Fist" offensive last March by moving into neighbouring Sudan to flush out rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The rebels fled back across the border into Uganda and have attacked scores of villages.
The group is headed by self-styled clairvoyant Joseph Kony, who has said in the past he wants to rule by the biblical Ten Commandments, although locals now say his agenda is more obscure.
"He claims to have supernatural powers, but you need to decide for yourself whether his claims are true," the 67-year-old former bishop told Reuters in an interview during a month-long peace mission to Britain and the United States.
He said the ARLPI had tried to broker a peace deal between the LRA and the government of President Yoweri Museveni but had been caught in an attack by the army on the rebels.
NO MOOD TO COMPROMISE
The government is in no mood to compromise with the rebels and has said it will finish them off by the end of February.
It declared a qualified victory over them last month and said the LRA had been reduced from a 3,000-strong army to a force of just 1,200 fighters, mostly children.
But Baker Ochola said the government's insistence on crushing the LRA was misguided.
"Ninety percent of the rebel soldiers are children who have been abducted, so do we have any moral justification to wage war on them?" he asked.
"The mind of a child is like a plant. It can easily be twisted. Should we not be trying to rescue these children instead?"
The ARPLI has appealed to the United States and former colonial power Britain to help. Baker Ochola said he had spoken to British Foreign Office officials and was waiting for a response.
"The international community has not put a human face on the conflict in northern Uganda," he said. "We want the government here to concern itself with the plight of those children."
The ARPLI says the conflict in Uganda is a direct consequence of the war on terror declared by Washington in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
It says Sudan only allowed the Ugandan army to enter the country because it was worried that if it did not, Washington would accuse it of harbouring terrorists.
"Sudan feared becoming a target," Baker Ochola said.
The ARPLI is a multi-religious group which has talked to both government and rebels in a bid to end the conflict, which has forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes.
