Uganda says rebel Kony has last chance to talk
By Frank Nyakairu
KAMPALA, June 2 (Reuters) - Uganda will launch a fresh military campaign with U.S. support against fugitive rebel leader Joseph Kony unless he agrees to return to peace talks, a government official said on Monday.
Kony, the elusive commander of the Lord's Resistance Army, is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for multiple war crimes including massacres, rapes and kidnapping.
He snubbed mediators waiting in April on the remote border between Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, another setback to years of on-off negotiations.
"We met the U.S. Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer and we all reached a consensus that Joseph Kony does not want peace talks," Uganda's International Affairs Minister Henry Okello Oryem told Reuters after a trip to the United States.
"So what we have decided to do is to give him a last shot to talk peace. Short of that, we have no option but to turn to the military option."
Kony and several hundred of his fighters are thought to move between camps in northeast Congo's dense Garamba Forest and neighbouring parts of Central African Republic.
Uganda has called in the past for a multinational regional force including U.N. peacekeepers based in Congo, to tackle Kony and his group in the difficult terrain.
A Ugandan government security source who requested anonymity said such an operation could now be launched as soon as mid-June and that Washington had agreed to help. He did not elaborate.
Meanwhile, Oryem said officials would consult leaders from the LRA's native northern Uganda on ways to kickstart the talks.
The negotiations, which began in south Sudan's capital Juba in July 2006, have been credited with bringing calm to the north after 21 years of civil war that uprooted 2 million people.
But the LRA continues to destabilise remote corners of oil-producing southern Sudan and mineral-rich eastern Congo and its fighters were recently accused by aid workers of killing and kidnapping villagers in the Central African Republic. (Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Matthew Tostevin) (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: africa.reuters.com/)
