KAMPALA, Uganda: The U.S. would support regional efforts to apprehend rebels who have waged a brutal 20-year insurgency in northern Uganda if talks to end the conflict fail, the top U.S. African affairs official said Wednesday.
Representatives of the Ugandan government and rebel Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, have been negotiating a peace deal in Sudan since July 2006. The talks have faltered, with rebel negotiators questioning the government's commitment to preliminary agreements both sides have already agreed to. They have also doubted whether the mediator, the autonomous government of Southern Sudan, is impartial.
"We feel that we have the basis, especially under the U.N. Security Council resolutions, to assist an effort to mop up the LRA," said Jendayi Frazer, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs.
For the rebels, "the peace talks are their way out. The other way is a renewed effort to apprehend them, and we would certainly support those efforts," Frazer told journalists.
Frazer said she appointed Timothy Shortley as a senior adviser on conflict resolution to help her work on resolving the northern Uganda conflict and instability in eastern Congo.
Frazer said Shortley would travel soon to Congo to meet with senior Congolese officials and discuss a U.S. role in easing tensions in the country's troubled eastern region.
She said there was a need to reach a political settlement with former Gen. Laurent Nkunda, whose combatants have been battling army troops in the eastern Congo region of North Kivu over the past week.
Following the ebb and flow of the fighting there, thousands of Congolese refugees have crossed into neighboring Uganda to seek temporary shelter and then gone back home.
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