KAMPALA – Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony has cited the arrest of former Liberian president Charles Taylor and ex-Congolese rebel chief Jean-Pierre Bemba as reasons for not signing a peace deal at the weekend.
The elusive Lord's Resistance Army LRA leader failed to meet a government delegation in southern Sudan on Saturday to sign a final peace agreement with Uganda to end a two-decade old conflict in the country's north.
"This time he raised the question of Bemba and Taylor and his argument was that they put themselves in a position where they could be picked," said Jimmy Akena, a lawmaker from Uganda's northern region who met Kony.
Though he declined to meet government envoys, Kony did however hold talks with cultural and religious leaders near his jungle hideout on the Democratic Republic of Congo-Sudan border.
He has repeatedly refused to sign the agreement concluded in April on the grounds that he faces outstanding arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court ICC over alleged war crimes.
"Bemba got into a peace process, went through elections and soon thereafter he was picked. Charles Taylor got into some agreement and then after, he was picked. So Kony was saying he doesn't want to be picked in the same way. He thinks he needs to be in a position where he can defend himself," Akena told .
Taylor was arrested in 2006 in Nigeria and is being tried before the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, while Bemba has been charged for war crimes before the ICC after his arrest in May.
The Uganda government delegation had travelled to a southern Sudan jungle town of Ri-Kwangba over the weekend in the hope that Kony would sign the deal already inked by Kampala.
Kony's LRA is accused of having raped and mutilated civilians, forcibly enlisting child soldiers and of massacring thousands during one of Africa's longest-running conflicts.
