Uganda spurns reported rebel peace move -- army
By Tim Cocks
KAMPALA, March 30 (Reuters) - Uganda has rejected what it termed an insincere rebel move towards peace talks to end a 17-year-old insurgency, the army said on Tuesday.
The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony is said by the army to have ordered his spokesperson Sam Kolo to attempt to contact the Ugandan government for peace talks.
"We are rejecting his efforts," army spokesman Major Shaban Bantariza told Reuters by telephone.
"We are saying categorically these are insincere efforts whose aim is to deceive those who are weak-minded, to deceive those who don't know Kony's history."
LRA rebels, led by reclusive mystic Joseph Kony, say they want to topple the Ugandan government, which is dominated by southerners, and give power to the north's Acholi people.
The United Nations estimates that 1.5 million people in the north have been displaced into squalid refugee camps by the fear of LRA attacks.
The camps are supposed to be protected yet rebels frequently infiltrate and attack civilians inside them. Last month more than 200 people were killed in an attack on Barlonyo refugee camp in Lira district, one of the worst LRA attacks on record.
President Yoweri Museveni vowed revenge on Saturday at a mass grave for those killed during the attack, seeking to soothe local anger at the army's failure to prevent the raid.
Museveni, himself a former guerrilla leader, said the army had killed 152 LRA fighters since the attack on Barlonyo, when rebels overran militia guards to hack, shoot and burn their victims to death as they hid inside huts.
Uganda has since the attack pursued the rebels inside southern Sudan to flush them out after signing an agreement with Khartoum earlier this month allowing it to do so.
The Ugandan army repeatedly says it is winning the war against the LRA, but many Ugandans are not convinced because the rebels continue to launch surprise attacks on lightly defended civilian targets.
Efforts at peace talks between the LRA and Kampala organised by the Gulu-based Acholi Reliious Leaders' Peace Initiative (ARLPI) at the start of 2003 collapsed in March that year after the rebels failed to turn up for talks.
"He (Kony) has come under intense pressure from our forces in Sudan and he wants to tell lies that he wants peace talks in order to get breathing space," Bantariza said.
03/30/04 12:40 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
