President Museveni meets with President Bush in DC, but are peace talks sidelined?
Today President Museveni met privately with President Bush in the White House to discuss the ongoing Juba peace process, regional security, bilateral economic ties and efforts to combate HIV/AIDS. If President Bush listened to the hundreds of emails we sent him this week or read our recent policy brief, he’d have known that the need to commit to the peace talks and refrain from military operations against the LRA was a crucial message to deliver to his counterpart face-to-face. In fact, a spokesperson for the White House Security Council said after the meeting, "President Bush asked President Museveni for his assessment of the situation on the ground and then they had a discussion about the need for the peace talks to go forward."
However, in a post-meeting press conference in the White House, neither President Bush nor President Museveni mentioned that they had confered about the Juba peace talks. They instead emphasized their discussions of regional security issues in Somalia and Sudan, HIV/AIDS and economic partnerships. We can only hope that President Bush did lose this chance to emphatically echo the voices of millions of northern Ugandans depending on the precarious peace talks to enable them to rebuild their lives.
However, in a post-meeting press conference in the White House, neither President Bush nor President Museveni mentioned that they had confered about the Juba peace talks. They instead emphasized their discussions of regional security issues in Somalia and Sudan, HIV/AIDS and economic partnerships. We can only hope that President Bush did lose this chance to emphatically echo the voices of millions of northern Ugandans depending on the precarious peace talks to enable them to rebuild their lives.