Peace team readies for meeting with LRA rebels

MARIDI, Sudan, July 26 (Reuters) A team of more than 100 people hoping to persuade Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony to end his uprising prepared today for the final leg of their journey to the Sudan-Congo border.

More than 20 relatives of senior LRA commanders, including several of Kony's former wives, have joined chiefs, elders and religious leaders from northern Uganda for the trip, which aims to meet Kony this week.

The delegation wants to convince Kony he will be safe to return to his native northern Uganda if he accepts a peace deal that rebel representatives and Uganda's government hope to agree at peace talks in southern Sudan's capital Juba.

''I will tell them the talks which have begun are truthful and will bring peace,'' said one of Kony's senior wives, who was abducted by the rebels in 1991 but escaped several years ago.

The vice president of the regional government of southern Sudan, Riek Machar, was due to arrive in the southern Sudanese town of Maridi today, joining the bulk of the delegation who flew in from Juba yesterday.

The group is then due to travel in a convoy of vehicles to a remote outpost on Sudan's border with Democratic Republic of Congo for the meeting, due to take place in the next few days.

Machar wants to broker an end to Kony's two-decade war with Uganda's government, which has uprooted nearly two million people in northern Uganda and destabilised southern Sudan.

The LRA set up bases in the south during the mid-1990s before shifting to the jungles of northeastern Congo last year.

If a deal is reached, Uganda's government has offered to protect Kony from 33 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity he faces before the International Criminal Court.

But a gulf of mistrust still divides the two sides. On Monday, the talks in Juba adjourned for a week of consultations.

REUTERS DKB BST1259