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According to the International Crisis Group (ICG), a cessation of hostilities signed between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) non-state armed group in August 2006 lent new promise to peace talks between the two parties to this long-running internal armed conflict. The talks, brokered by South Sudan Vice-President Riek Machar, opened in Juba, Sudan, in July 2006, but gained new traction since the truce announcement. Substantial differences between the two sides' agendas remain, however, notably including outstanding International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Joseph Kony and other top leaders. In December 2008, the ICG claimed that the Juba peace process, intended to bring closure to the northern Uganda conflict and disarm the LRA, was failing. On 29 November 2008, Kony failed again to appear at the Ri-Kwangba assembly point to sign the Final Peace Agreement (FPA). Since April, armed actions attributed (not always accurately) to the LRA resumed in Sudan’s Western Equatoria state and the Bas Uélé district of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The LRA has moved out of Uganda, but the north does not yet have the certainty of sustainable peace. No military solution is realistic, in the view of the ICG, but a credible national alternative to the ICC indictment of Kony and four others was not provided in sufficient detail to draw the LRA leaders from their lair. Moreover, Juba’s disarmament and reintegration provisions are irrelevant for key movement combatants. Since its transfer to Sudan in 1994, the LRA has committed innumerable mass atrocities, and has notably recruited and abducted Sudanese civilians, who now are probably the majority of its fighters. Further reading
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