Uganda religious leaders urge talks to end war
By Paul Busharizi
KAMPALA, March 11 (Reuters) - Religious leaders in Uganda said on Thursday the government's military campaign to crush northern rebels and end a 17-year war had failed, and urged renewed dialogue between the warring parties.
Their plea came just weeks after Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels shot or burned to death around 250 people near Lira town in northern Uganda in one of the country's worst massacres.
"We believe that a solution based on military intervention is inappropriate," Catholic Bishop John Baptist Odama said, representing religious leaders and civil groups..
"In spite of the fact that the government claims that it will soon finish the war militarily, to date the war continues to drag on with no end in sight," Odama told a news conference in Kampala.
The government's two-year Operation Iron Fist campaign in northern Uganda had also failed to stop child abductions or massive population displacement, he said.
Since the Lira attacks, which provoked outrage in northern Uganda at the government's apparent failure to protect civilians, the army has said it killed about 100 rebels in retaliatory strikes.
The government launched Operation Iron Fist in March 2002, when President Yoweri Museveni poured 14,000 troops, tanks and artillery into the northern region to wipe out the LRA.
Led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony, the LRA has spread fear through the north, paralysing economic activity and defying attempts by the army to crush the revolt.
The LRA are feared for hacking off villagers' lips and abducting children for use as sex slaves and frontline fighters.
The movement has never issued a clear statement of its demands, but says it is fighting for the rights of the northern Acholi people, who have long felt neglected by the government in the capital Kampala.
But Acholi were also the main victims of the LRA's attacks, which typically target civilians.
Odama, himself an Acholi, said avenues for the rebels to spell out their agenda were closed after they were labelled as a terrorist organisation by the U.S. State Department.
"After September 11 (2001) the LRA Web site was shut down and a radio in northern Uganda opened to enhance dialogue shut down," he said.
Odama said more than 10,000 children were abducted between June 2002 and the end of 2003, and internal displacement doubled during Operation Iron Fist to 1.2 million.
03/11/04 12:43 ET
"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
