Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/un2lrauganda032008.html
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.
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...
