As
Uganda's Kony Angles for Impunity, Council Blows Off Menkerios, Kofi
Feted Despite Karim
Byline:
Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS, March 20 -- A mere
week before the deadline for the
Lord's Resistance Army
to sign a peace treaty with the Museveni government of Uganda, the UN
Security Council couldn't find time to hear a briefing on the conflict
from Haile Menkerios, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Political
Affairs.
Mr.
Menkerios waited in the Council chamber and finally left after noon.
Inner City Press caught up with him and asked what had happened in the
Council. "They didn't have time," Menkerios said. "They told me to come
back next Wednesday." That is literally the day before LRA leader Joseph
Kony, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, is to
appear to Juba in South Sudan and sign the peace treaty. Kony through
his lawyers has said he will only sign if the ICC indictments are
dropped. "He's said that several times," Menkerios told Inner City
Press. "Irrespective of where he moves" -- reportedly, Kony is in the
Central African Republic -- "he is expected to come to Juba to sign,
Chissano expects him to sign."
Inner City Press asked if there
might have been a plan, prior to the Council canceling Menkerios'
appearance, to issue a Presidential Statement to focus the minds of the
parties, the LRA and Museveni. "I don't know what the Council was
thinking," Menkerios said, adding that if the peace agreement is signed,
then Special Envoy Chissano will come and brief.
News analysis: but if Kony is to be believed,
he will only sign if he is given assurances that the ICC indictments
will not be enforced. Some say that the Museveni government is making
precisely that promise, though not formally until an agreement is
signed.
Haile Menkerios, delayed briefing not shown
Meanwhile at New York's Waldorf=Astoria
Hotel, where a banquet hall was being prepared with white flowers and an
enormous video screen for a ceremony for Kofi Annan, UN human rights
personalities like Allan Rock and Louise Arbour traded speeches from
deep red leather chairs, about the end of impunity. But when will the
impunity end? Beyond Kony, Kofi
Annan himself
promised there would be justice for Eastern Congo warlord Peter Karim,
who recruited child soldiers and kidnapped seven UN peacekeepers,
killing two of them. But now more than a year into Annan's successor's
term, Karim is still at large, living large, from a hotel in Kinshasa to
an officer's post in the Congolese Army. End of impunity indeed...
* * *
These reports are
usually also available through
Google News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here for a
Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army.
Click
here
for an earlier
Reuters AlertNet
piece about the Somali National Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's
$200,000 contribution from an undefined trust fund.
Video
Analysis here
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