Rights group slams South Sudan for aiding rebels

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

KAMPALA, June 4 (Reuters) Southern Sudan's young regional government has ignored an obligation to arrest notorious Ugandan rebels, instead supplying them with cash and food, a U.S.-based human rights group said.

Southern Sudan's vice president gave fugitive commanders of the brutal Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) 20,000 dollar during a meeting last month deep in the bush close to the Congolese border.

That surprised many observers because LRA leader Joseph Kony and his deputies are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for committing atrocities against civilians.

''Southern Sudan's leaders should arrest people accused of horrific war crimes, not give them food and money,'' Jemera Rone, east Africa coordinator for Human Rights Watch (HRW), said in a statement seen by Reuters on Sunday.

The LRA has waged war on Uganda's government for 20 years, uprooting up to 2 million northerners, mutilating survivors, kidnapping children and triggering a humanitarian catastrophe.

For more than a decade it has operated from bases in lawless Southern Sudan, where it has also terrorised villagers.

Before handing over the cash, the south's Vice President Riek Machar agreed with Kony to end years of fighting, and he also offered to mediate between the LRA and their arch foe, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

HRW said several South Sudanese parliamentarians expressed surprise that their leadership gave the LRA resources they said would have been better spent helping the victims of their own two-decade civil war.

Despite a peace deal signed with Khartoum in January 2005, Southern Sudan remains one of the poorest places on earth.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, a top U.N.

official in the south, James Ellery, said if asked, his mission would support the regional government's attempts to find a long-term solution to the LRA threat through talks.

Kony's fighters were having a disproportionate and hugely damaging effect on development, he said, and as the south was not a sovereign state, it was not obliged to work with the ICC.

But HRW said Southern Sudan did have an obligation to help bring the rebels to justice, not help them with supplies.

''These payments have stopped the LRA attacks on civilians in Sudan, at the cost of rewarding the LRA,'' Rone said in a statement. ''What happens when the government stops paying?'' REUTERS SK PC1453

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