Uganda is bitter over the $20,000 (Shs36 million) gift the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army recently gave Lord’s Resistance Army chief Joseph Kony as a goodwill gesture.

Uganda fears that Kony could use the money to rearm, plan and launch more atrocities against Ugandans as he has done in the past 20 years in which hundreds in northern Uganda have died, thousands maimed and 1.5 million displaced into camps.

President Museveni was the first to raise the protest during a meeting he held with the SPLM/A leader and Sudan First Vice-President Salva Kiir in Kampala on May 13, sources said yesterday.

HARD CASH: Joseph Kony receives the $20,000 from the SPLM/A No.2 Dr Riek Machar.

But Mr Henry Okello Oryem, a nominated minister and former minister of state for International Relations, downplayed Uganda’s protest.

“As far as we are concerned these people [LRA] are like on a holiday,” he said. “Our view was that before they are given the money, there should have been deeper discussions...the LRA should have given an irreversible commitment that they are ready for the talks.

“The SPLA gave an explanation which we felt was genuine...that Southern Sudan needs peace so to give Kony money was in good faith.”
Daily Monitor on Thursday published a photo on its front page of Kony receiving a brown envelope containing $20,000 from Mr Kiir’s deputy, Riek Machar, at a meeting they held on April 11 somewhere in Southern Sudan.

Dr Machar said at the meeting that the money was from Kiir to facilitate Kony buy food and not arms.
If Kony does not follow the gentleman’s agreement he reached with Machar, he can use the $20,000 in his pocket to buy 40 Sub-Machine Guns on the black market, enough to energise his shrinking rag-tag band of fighters. In some bush markets in Southern Sudan, for $100 apiece, he can buy 200 used SMGs.

However, a Geneva-based international negotiator is angry about the leakage of the details of the meeting to the media saying it was going to reduce Kony’s confidence in the process towards peace talks. The negotiator claims that Kony did not know he was being secretly filmed and that the pictures would be splashed in the media all over the world.

The other problem is that of the International Criminal Court which in September last year indicted Kony and four other top LRA commanders for crimes against humanity. The Hague-based court is unhappy that Uganda is negotiating an amnesty for the LRA leaders when the indictment is on.

The Museveni government has given Kony up to the end of July to make peace in return for possible immunity from prosecution.

Unofficially, Ugandan officials argue that even international court proceedings can be put aside to enable a national peace process to take place.
As the diplomatic efforts continue, Uganda is involved in negotiations with several players in the Great Lakes on how to rout the LRA now encamped in Garamba National Park in the northeast of the DR Congo.

During his swearing-in ceremony on May 12, Mr Museveni called on regional powers to join hands to resolve the Kony rebellion. “Some of these issues are not as difficult to resolve as they appear,” the President said. “The region, working with Burundi political parties, successfully resolved the issue of Burundi that had been paraded around as unsolvable. IGAD contributed decisively to the solution of the problem of Southern Sudan. The region had, earlier on, singly solved the problem of Idi Amin and stopped the genocide in Rwanda.”

The Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Aronda Nyakairima, and the Chief of Military Intelligence, Col. Leo Kyanda, on Friday returned from the DR Congo after a bilateral meeting over Kony.

As Aronda and Kyanda were talking in Kinshasa, another regional meeting was simultaneously going on in Kigali where dissidents operating out of DR Congo, including Kony, were on the agenda. The Kigali meeting was expected to end by close of the weekend.

Another security meeting was being planned in the Sudan in which Kony has been invited. Earlier reports indicated that this last one had already taken place in Juba, Southern Sudan on Thursday but the Director General External Security, Mr Maku’Iga Angalefo, said he doubted that such a meeting took place.

But these meetings are not a surprise to many observers of the northern Uganda conflict and the Great Lakes generally.

On May 16, Dr Jendayi Frazer, America’s top diplomat on Africa, spoke confidently about solving the Kony menace this year.

“There’s this nasty little group called the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda which is just creating havoc, killing kids, kidnapping people and we have to take care of that problem, and we need to work together to do so,” Frazer told a gathering at the Chatham House think-tank in London.

To drive the point home, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs said: “Certainly it’s going to be a priority of President Bush’s administration to get rid of the LRA before the end of this year, if we can.”

On the same day President Museveni told British Overseas Development Minister Hillary Benn that Uganda and Southern Sudan had given Kony up to the end of July to end hostilities.

A statement from the British High Commission quoted Mr Benn as saying: “We agreed that there must be regional co-operation to tackle the threat of LRA, which would be helped by the appointment of a special UN envoy for the region.”