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New Vision (Kampala)February 14, 2004
Posted to the web February 16, 2004
Anne Mugisa
Kampala
The Church Missionaries Society (CMS) will host a conference of all major players in the northern conflict, including international NGOs, to find a way of ending the Kony war.The CMS also wants a peace-keeping force similar to the one in war-torn Sierra Leone to ensure that killings stop to give way for peace building.
"We believe strongly that a humanitarian peace-keeping force also needs to be put in place at the same time, similar to that in Sierra Leone, to ensure the killing stops first and that peace building stands a chance," CMS East Africa manager Tim Sanders said in a statement.Other aid agencies have welcomed CMS's call to pool efforts to end the war. The conference is slated for March.The CMS put the idea to agency representatives at Human Rights Watch's (HRW) UK headquarters in Pentoville Road on Thursday.
The HRW was hosting a religious and traditional leaders and academics from Uganda.The statement said it was cautiously welcoming announcements in London that the International Criminal Court's prosecutor had determined sufficient basis to investigate the Lord's Resistance Army.
The CMS said it woould not pretend that just one man was responsible for the northern conflict. It said justice must not end with Kony."The situation has been allowed to become so marginalised that grievances and suspicions about the government's failure to protect all people may transfer to other "Konys," it said.
"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
