A Ugandan government official met overnight with the elusive rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony, officials said Monday, as local leaders pressed both sides to clinch a lasting peace.
Rebel spokesman Obonyo Olweny said Kony, who faces international arrest warrants, held talks aimed at ending the 19-year-old insurgency with Walter Ochora, a district commissioner for northern Uganda's Gulu District.
The meeting took place in Nabanga, a small trading post along the southern Sudan-Democratic Republic of Congo border, but Olweny said he could not the divulge the outcome.
"They held talks last night and Ochora is here to deliver a message to the peace conference (in Juba) and he also has a message for the government of Uganda," Olweny told AFP. Paddy Ankunda, spokesman for the government, confirmed the meeting which took placed hours before the resumption of talks in Juba between the two sides.
In 1994, Kony held face-to-face talks with Betty Bigombe, who was the minister in charge of northern Uganda. The Nabanga meeting came as more than 100 Ugandan traditional and religious leaders joined the peace talks, mediated by Riak Machar, the vice president of the semi-autonomous region of southern Sudan, to end the bloody conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced around two million. Olweny said the leaders delivered a memorandum urging both sides to resolve the conflict peacefully.
"The key point in the elders' memorandum is a call on the LRA and the government of Uganda to continue with the peace talks until a lasting solution is found," he said. "They also delivered a message that the people of Uganda fully support the peace process," Olweny said, adding that the elders will "actively participate in the reconciliation and confidence-building phase of the talks."
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