Uganda’s Amnesty Commission has begun the documentation and registration process to grant amnesty to 46 former rebels of the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) repatriated from the Central African Republic (CAR), a spokesperson said Tuesday.
The rebels, a faction that surrendered to the armed forces of the CAR, together with 91 of their children and wives, will be given amnesty certificates and resettlement packages, Moses Draku, the spokesperson of Amnesty Commission, told Xinhua over the telephone. “We shall give them amnesty. There is a process that they are supposed to go through. Once they are done, they will receive their certificates and package.”
In July, August and September, Uganda received three batches of the members of the rebel faction that denounced the over two-decade rebellion and abandoned the LRA leader Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court to answer charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The LRA is a Ugandan rebel group that waged a 20-year-long insurgency until it was driven out of the country by the military in 2006 after failed peace talks. The rebel group fled to neighboring South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the CAR.
Since the setting up of the Amnesty Commission in 2000, over 30,000 ex-rebels who took arms against the state have been granted amnesty, according to the commission.
