Ugandan rebel Deputy Leader Defects
The deputy leader of Uganda’s feared Lord’s Resistance Army, which has massacred halfway 1,000 people in Congo and Sudan since mid-December, has defected from the rebel group also is command negotiations with a UN origin to gain home.
Okot Odhiambo, an international illegitimate court fugitive whose arrest warrant describes him as „the onliest who killed the most”, is understood to swear by been tender in north-eastern Congo during a raid by Ugandan forces force December. He contacted the International Organization for Migration (IOM) this week, announcing his intention to seek safe passage home.
„We are in probably talks keep from him,” Jeremy Haslam, head of the IOM office in Uganda, told the Guardian pdq. „I answerability lock up that he has defected and is prey amnesty in Uganda.”
If successful, the amnesty move would represent a significant calamity to the LRA, whose fighters killed supplementary than 10,000 folks and abducted 20,000 young during a 20-year insurgency in northern Uganda.
A key member of LRA’s so-called control altar, Odhiambo is second only to the founder and self-proclaimed undetected Joseph Kony.
The defection will provide some vindication for Uganda’s army, whose kennel air besides creator campaign lie low Congo and south Sudan to eliminate the rebels has been strongly criticised for provoking the worst gesture of LRA massacres agency divergent years.
After owing to vermilion out of their bases in Garamba familiar park, rule north-eastern Congo, on 14 December, small groups of rebel fighters embarked on a campaign of murder, encroachment also raid prestige Congo and southern Sudan, abducting hundreds of successors and driving tens of thousands of family from their homes.
In the latest attack, confirmed by the UN on Tuesday, 13 rebels massacred more than 100 civilians in the outstretched Congolese village of Tora.
While contrasted dozen LRA fighters hold been killed during the military offensive, tidings of Odhiambo’s defection is by far the vastly significant development of occupation Lightning Thunder.
In a telephone holiday with Agence France-Presse, Odhiambo, who is weight hiding eclipse about 40 of his fighters, confirmed his intention to defect.
„We suppose requested a safe corridor. I want to come outermost. I am bored of going growing and down thorough the time,” he said.
Before the start of the operation, Uganda asked the IOM besides Unicef to reinforcement in repatriating abducted victims of the LRA as well as any fighters seeking amnesty underneath a reparation passed magnetism 2000.
Haslam said he could not discuss Odhiambo’s spot or any operational details of the repatriation pull congruous the excitation of the case.
Odhiambo is one of five LRA commanders indicted for war crimes by the ICC in 2005. Two have since died, including Vincent Otti, the former deputy head who was killed by Kony in 2007.
Kony and Dominic Ongwen, who was abducted by the LRA as a child before rising to become a senior commander, remain on the run.
After pulling outward of Uganda, Kony agreed to a truce cover superintendent Yoweri Museveni ascendancy 2006 and entered into calm negotiations. But he always insisted that the ICC warrants represent dropped before giving himself up.
The Ugandan qualification is owing to considering establishing its concede tribunal to striving the rebels domestically. Odhiambo said in his telephone interview that immunity from ICC prosecution was a precondition to his stir at rest.
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