Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has said the leaders of Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a militia group fighting the government for the last two decades in the north, should comply with the ongoing Juba peace process or perish.

"If Kony does not take chance of the peace talks, he will perish like the pharaoh," Museveni was quoted by Daily Monitor as saying on Tuesday in a direct response to the most recent threats by the LRA to resume war.

LRA deputy chief Vincent Otti promised a resumption of war in northern Uganda if the ongoing peace talks in Juba, southern Sudan, ended without the dropping of arrest warrants for the top rebel leadership issued by the International Criminal Court in 2005.

"We cannot go back to Uganda without lifting these indictments, " Otti told UK's Sky News TV in an interview broadcast last Friday.

"That is impossible. We cannot go and without our going none of the other soldiers can go. But we can fight."

Otti, along with Joseph Kony, the supreme leader of the rebel group, and other senior rebel commanders were indicted by the UN's court based in the Hague for over 30 counts of crimes and wanted by the Interpol.

The Ugandan army has since killed Raska Lukwiya, one of the accused, in battle in northern Uganda last August.

Museveni compared the rebel commanders to the Egyptian Pharaoh whose forces drowned in the Red Sea for refusing to heed advice against subjecting the Israelites to extended suffering.

"If Kony decides to come back (to war), it is up to him," the President responded.

Museveni said the rebels' conduct was provocative and could jeopardize the tottering peace talks. The latest round of those talks resume on Thursday in Juba.

Meanwhile, a group of LRA rebels raided two villages in western Equatoria province, including the home of the information minister of southern Sudan, killing four people, abducting 12 others and looting livestock.

The group, under the command of Thomas Kwoyello, was heading to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the rebels are hiding in the dense bush, according to the northern- based spokesman of Uganda's People's Defense Army, Lt. Chris Magezi.

The latest deadline for the LRA fighters to assemble expired on May 26. An addendum, signed on April 14, had given them six weeks to move to Ri-Kwangba in southern Sudan. But the army's publicist said intelligence indicated the rebels violated the agreement.

The Ugandan government and the LRA have been engaged in the peace talk in Juba since last July, in a fresh bid to end one of Africa's longest conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced over 1.4 million in northern Uganda.

Source: Xinhua