President Joseph Kabila’s government vowed on Wednesday to destroy the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), condemned by the UN for a series of atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo).
“We have decided to destroy the LRA,” government spokesman Lambert Mende Omalanga said, a day after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the LRA’s alleged role in massacres in DR Congo and southern Sudan.
“We have given the LRA the chance to negotiate peace with the authorities in its country, but in the end they refused to sign,” Omalanga said. “We cannot keep people on our territory who kill innocents.”
Omalanga was speaking after reports emerged of atrocities attributed to LRA fighters in eastern DR Congo.
The Catholic charity Caritas said the LRA had killed more than 400 people in Christmas massacres in the Haut-Uele district of northeastern DR Congo, which shares a border with Uganda.
Officers of the Ugandan army, which with Congolese and Sudanese soldiers have been hunting down LRA fighters in northeast DR Congo since Dec. 14, also accused the LRA of the massacre.
On Monday, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said LRA fighters had killed at least 189 civilians in the region.
Richard Domba, the archbishop of Dungu-Doroma in northeast Orientale Province, denounced what he said was the “indescribable savagery and barbarousness” of the rebels.
The rebels have denied any responsibility for the killings, blaming the three-nation military force that is hunting them down.
Uganda and the LRA have been engaged in peace talks led by the government of south Sudan for more than two years.
But the protracted discussions fell through in November after LRA leader Joseph Kony repeatedly failed to sign a peace deal agreed with Uganda in July 2006, citing fears that he would be arrested on war crimes charges.
Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court over the killings carried out by the LRA during its 20-year war against the Ugandan government.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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