Kampala, Uganda - Uganda is ready to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on war crimes charges if he ever visits Sudan's southern neighbour, a senior government official said Monday. "Uganda has an obligation to the UN and is committed to the Rome Statute. Warrants of arrest for Bashir are already in the Solicitor General's office," deputy foreign minister Henry Okello Oryem told reporters. "We are ready to arrest him. Let him try to land here and he sees what happens to him."
The Kampala government is a signatory to the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court (ICC) that indicted the Sudanese president for war crimes in the country's war-battered Darfur region.
Kampala has informed the Sudanese president of its stand on the matter and will carry out the arrests if he comes to Uganda, Okello said.
The comments were made in the presence of the ICC prosecutor general Louis Moreno Ocampo who is currently visiting the region and is on a two-day mission to Uganda where he is scheduled to hold talks with President Yoweri Museveni.
Ocampo said al-Bashir has been visiting several countries which are not signatory to the Rome Statute, including some north African and Arab states, but "must be arrested and be handed over to The Hague for trial."
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced in Sudan's western Darfur region in clashes between government and government-supported militia forces and rebel organizations.
The Hague-based ICC in 2005 also issued arrest warrants for five leaders of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who several years ago moved to the north-east Democratic Republic of Congo from northern Uganda where the rebels have killed and maimed thousands of civilians and displaced nearly 2 million people.
Ocampo told reporters that the UN peace-keeping force in the DR Congo and the Congolese government should arrest the LRA leader Joseph Kony and the two remaining indicted rebel commanders.
"They should be not be killed but be arrested and taken for trial for the atrocities they have committed for the past 20 years," he said.
