The United Nations should raise the threat of force against Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army rebels, and put pressure on Sudan and Congo to ensure the LRA is serious about peace talks, a Ugandan envoy said.
Uganda's representative in the southern Sudanese capital Juba said his government would soon send a delegation to meet LRA representatives waiting in the town to start negotiations, but did not say exactly when.
"The military option must not be forgotten," Ambassador Busho Ndinyenka told Reuters in an interview late on Thursday. "They must know that if they are not serious about talks there is a military option."
Uganda has urged the United Nations to use troops from a peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of Congo to disarm the LRA, who crossed into the country from Sudan last year.
Ndinyenka said Uganda also wants to see more pressure put on Congo's government to deal with the LRA, one of many armed groups operating in the east of the vast country.
Kinshasa is struggling to field a credible army after years of civil war, and has few resources to tackle the experienced LRA guerrillas, who killed 8 Guatemalan UN troops in January.
"We want pressure on all involved, the backers of the LRA and the LRA itself to engage in talks," Ndinyenka said. "I'm talking about Sudan and Congo, who are the biggest culprits in this matter," he said. "There must be pressure on all parties."
LRA leader Joseph Kony, who is wanted for war crimes by the Hague-based International Criminal Court along with four of his commanders, met southern Sudanese officials in May and June - his first known meeting with mediators in years. South Sudan's regional government says it wants to broker an end to the 19-year conflict between the LRA and the Ugandan government, which has uprooted almost two million people in northern Uganda and destabilised southern Sudan.
The LRA team in Juba said it was committed to the peace process and urged Kampala to send a representative as soon as possible.
"It is now up to the Uganda government to demonstrate that it is also interested in peace by sending its own delegation to Juba," said the statement signed by Obonyo Olweny, spokesman for the LRA delegation to the talks.
Kony's group moved to Sudan in 1994, when the Sudanese government in Khartoum adopted it as a proxy to help fight its own southern rebels and undermine the Ugandan government.
Sudan says it stopped backing Kony under a pact signed with Uganda in 1999, but Ndinyenka said his government could not be certain of this. "Sudan has broken agreements in the past," he said, calling for international pressure to ensure Khartoum had severed ties with the rebels completely.
Ndinyenka said the Ugandan government was committed to negotiations despite its doubts over Kony's motives. "This man Kony can break your heart, when you think you are progressing well you can land on a concrete rock," he said.
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