“We’re looking forward to the conclusion of this process in a timely manner to address a formal ceasefire, demobilisation and reintegration of the former fighters,” she said. “We don’t believe that this should be an open-ended process, so we’re hoping that these current consultations will be the beginning of the end of this peace process. We feel we have the basis, especially under the UN Security Council Resolution, to assist in efforts to mop up the LRA and to get them out of Congo,” Dr Frazer told journalists in Kampala last week. “So we will not sit still and just let them live in Garamba Park and cultivate land and kill animals. The peace process is their way out; the other way is a renewed effort to apprehend them. We certainly would support those efforts to apprehend them.”
The official reiterated US government support to the peace talks in Juba but warned that they were not the only way to resolve the 20-year-conflict in northern Uganda, citing as an alternative the International Criminal Court indictments issued against LRA rebel leader Joseph Kony and three of his top lieutenants. “We certainly believe that there needs to be some accountability,” the assistant secretary said. Dr Frazer spoke after meeting President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda as part of a diplomatic effort to avoid growing conflict, particularly in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The US official announced the appointment of Tim Shortley, her new senior advisor on conflict resolution, as Washington’s point man on the talks in Juba to ensure that the other issues on her plate — Somalia and Darfur — do not push the conflict in northern Uganda or the tension in eastern DR Congo off the agenda. Gulu Resident District Commissioner Walter Ochora, who attended a meeting between Dr Frazer and leaders from northern Uganda, told The EastAfrican that the new position taken by the US was an independent one.
“We did not push for that position in our meeting with [Dr Frazer]; that is their own thinking. The US government supports the peace talks, but they don’t want endless talks. Of course nobody would want the talks to go on for decades, taking into consideration the fact that the IDPs (internally displaced persons) can’t go home from the camps because they are not yet sure about their security,” he said. Mr Ochora, a retired army colonel, has travelled to the designated LRA assembly point in Ri-Kwangba on the Sudan-Congo border five times as the head of a government team that attempted to hold parallel talks with the top LRA leaders who have refused to travel to Juba because of the ICC indictments hanging over their heads.
Mr Ochora said the Uganda government has always maintained the option of engaging the LRA militarily if the peace talks fail. “No one wants the talks to fail, but in the event that they fail, there must be an alternative. We will have to use the military option because everybody wants peace in northern Uganda,” he said. Mr Ochora added that at their meeting with the American official, Dr Frazer assured them of American support for the resettlement of the more than 1.7 million people who had to flee their homes at the height of the war.
“She told us that the government of the US is going to support the resettlement programme fully. This programme is very expensive, it is going to cost about $500 million, but she assured us that her government will support this programme substantially,” he said. LRA officials were not available for comment as they could not be reached on any of their known mobile phone numbers. However, in October last year, after President Museveni stated during a meeting with US Senator John Edwards that he expected America to back his “Plan B” to resume military operations against the LRA if the peace talks failed, LRA deputy commander Vincent Otti dared the US to come to the battlefield.
“I don’t bother about America,” Mr Otti told Daily Monitor by telephone, “Even if it was the whole world. I will get bothered when I die; even the same Americans can be killed by the bullets we have here and it will not take me a week to get back into Uganda to fight if Museveni is serious with his Plan B against us.” Dr Frazer told journalists that the US government is worried that a fresh regional war involving Uganda, Rwanda and DR Congo could flare up as a result of renewed fighting in eastern Congo between government troops and rebels loyal to renegade Congolese General Laurent Nkunda.
Gen Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi who is close to Kigali, accuses President Joseph Kabila’s troops of allying with Hutu rebels of the Forces Democratique pour la Liberation de Rwanda (FDLR), a rebel group that the Rwandese government considers a threat to its stability. “I am concerned about the continuing activity of negative forces, particularly in the Congo — whether that be the FDLR or the Interahamwe or the LRA — as well as the need for some type of political solution to the situation with Nkunda,” Dr Frazer said at the end of her one-day visit to Uganda.
Dr Frazer said she had also spoken with Presidents Kabila of Congo and Paul Kagame of Rwanda over the security situation in the Great Lakes, and that “all stated that they want to work together diplomatically to try to reduce the tension in the region.” According to Dr Frazer, the US government is ready to back co-ordinated military operations by the three countries to fend off rebel forces fighting any government while using a neighbouring country as a military base. In the late 1990s, after the death of Mobutu Sese Seko, Uganda and Rwanda became embroiled in a war in the vast DR Congo (then called Zaire) – a struggle to fill the power vacuum in the country that degenerated into a battle for control of the country’s vast mineral resources and sucked in half a dozen countries. Dr Frazer also vowed that her government would not shy away from employing military means to end the activities of the “negative forces” if efforts to end conflicts through dialogue are not successful — yet another indicator of the new approach the US is taking on conflicts in the region,
In particular, Dr Frazer highlighted the LRA — which she said is already listed as a negative force under the Lusaka Accord and in UN Security Council Resolutions — and the rebel forces in Congo as among the groups that might come under a UN-brokered military campaign.