Uganda set to sign rebel peace deal

RI KWANGBA, Sudan, Nov. 29 (UPI) -- Ugandan officials said Saturday they're waiting in Sudan for rebel leader Joseph Kony to arrive to sign a peace deal ending his 20-year-old uprising.

Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, has failed to show up at other proposed treaty signings because he's afraid of being arrested on Ugandan charges as well as on war crimes warrants issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the BBC reported.

The Ugandan government has said it would ask for Kony's local arrest warrants to be lifted, but Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa said that Kony first had to sign the peace deal before the ICC charges were addressed.

"We were only prepared to talk to the ICC about an alternative method of resolving that dispute, and also of justice in the country, only if peace is going to come to the people of northern Uganda," Kutesa told the BBC. "Our people are ready to sign any time, but Kony is the one who has been eluding us."

Former Mozambique President Joachim Chissano told the broadcaster he understood Kony was heading to the signing ceremony in Ri Kwangba in Sudan from his jungle hideout in the Democratic Republic of Congo.