Mick Hartley

Joseph Kony, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, is reportedly prepared, at last, to sign a peace deal:

"Every indication is that there will be signing on 29th [November]," Joachim Chissano [acting UN mediator] told the BBC.

The LRA refused to sign an agreement in April because of international arrest warrants against its leaders.

Earlier, Uganda's government said it was considering asking the UN Security Council to suspend the warrants.

But Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa made it clear that Mr Kony must sign the deal first before the issue of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was addressed.

We've been here before, with nothing to show for it. For a while influential voices in Uganda and elsewhere have argued that the ICC warrants for Kony and the other LRA heads for crimes against humanity should be quietly dropped, being all that stands in the way of a settlement. Negotiations now are clearly centering on those warrants.

"I don't have reasons to doubt that he'll not show up, because all the indications which he gave coming up to now are encouraging so I'm more confident than a few weeks ago," he [Chissano] said.

[Too many negatives! – I think he means "I don't have reasons to doubt that he'll show up".]

A one-year suspension by UN Security Council of the arrest warrants would give the government time to prove that it was able to deal with the matter, Mr Chissano said.

"I think that the UN Security Council would facilitate because the alternative is to have Kony forever in the jungles of Congo."

Which sounds to me as though they're preparing to do a deal with Kony.

Nick Grono, vice president of the International Crisis Group, put it like this two years ago:

If one accepts that the ICC is the main obstacle to peace – itself a premature judgment – it is difficult to argue that criminal accountability and the need to establish an effective ICC to deter future war criminals should take precedence over the immediate suffering of the northern Ugandans.

On the other hand, it is inconceivable that those directly responsible for these unspeakable crimes should escape being held accountable.

The fighting in northern Uganda is effectively over, though, so there can surely be little excuse now for letting Kony off the hook.

On the other hand, according to this Independent article of a couple of weeks ago, the LRA, far from being a burnt-out cause, have stepped up their terror raids in the northern Congo:

[T]he terror has been transplanted, this time to the remote north of Congo. The bewildered victims of this campaign know nothing of the cause espoused by those that are hunting them – they have never been to neighbouring Uganda. The rebel fighters moved into camps in Congo's Garamba National Park in what was hoped would be the final staging post before peace. But those talks have collapsed after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Kony's arrest. A deadline for the end of this month has been given to the guerrillas. They sign the deal or face the consequences, but in their hundreds they have already slipped the net.

All along the border with South Sudan scores of refugees are streaming out of the bush and across the border every day with horrifying accounts of the return of the LRA.

Father Paul was on his way for an afternoon nap on 17 September in the Komboni mission in the Congolese village of Duru when he heard shouting. Looking outside he saw dozens of soldiers marching towards the mission. "They were dressed like soldiers but they were dirty. Some wore witch doctors' hats and dreads in their hair." Marching with them were the girls and boys of the village, women with babies, all carrying their meagre possessions: mattresses, radios, sugar, mobile phones and soap.

Pushing past Father Paul into the courtyard of the mission everyone was ordered to sit on the floor, while the building was ransacked. A frail man in his late 70s, Father Paul was taken to his room and tortured by soldiers who insisted the priests must have money in the mission. "I thought I was going to die so I got on my knees and prayed to the Lord. When they heard me say his name they screamed at me, 'Don't say that word!' And then hit me with their guns."

Such attacks have been replayed across an entire region in recent weeks driving tens of thousands of the Zande people to flee into South Sudan or deeper into the forests of Congo.

The scene, says Father Paul, was straight out of the days of slavery. The children were divided, then bound together and made to march, he remembers. […]

At stake are a mesh of competing interests that stretch from Khartoum, through Darfur to the threatened Eastern Congolese city of Goma and the capital of Rwanda, Kigali. Rebel groups can be used to control the money generated by Congo's fabulous mineral wealth but they also serve the dual purpose of helping to destabilise regional rivals. A recipe for proxy wars without end.

Lexon Bashir, the director of the South Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Committee, rails against the "so-called LRA". "Why are they abducting children? Sudanese boys and girls as well. We have seen children burnt beyond recognition their bodies thrown into fires." He sees an outside hand in the violent re-emergence of Mr Kony's cult but refuses to say whose.

In private others are less reticent, pointing to helicopter drops of arms and ammunition to the LRA. They believe that the government of Khartoum led by President Omar al-Bashir – a fellow indictee the ICC – is helping Kony's army with a view to destabilising southern Sudan ahead of a possible resumption of that civil war.

Whatever the truth here – and like so much else to do with the DR of Congo, the situation is so complex and remote it's next to impossible to tell – what can be said is that Kony was a pioneer in the art, commonplace now in the eastern Congo, of kidnapping and brutalising young children to form a ready-made army. Here, from Wikipedia, are figures compiled from a survey of children abducted by the LRA, which are worth bearing in mind when the eventual fate of Joseph Kony is being decided: