When indicted war criminals want to travel, who do they call? The United Nations, it seems.

Last week, the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs convened a meeting of donors, seeking to raise $7.7 million to re-energise peace talks between the Ugandan government and leaders of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who have been indicted by the U.N.-affiliated International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes committed during a brutal, two-decade insurgency in northern Uganda.

Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Margareta Wahlstrom told reporters at U.N. headquarters that "half that amount has been pledged, but is not in the cash box... We need all $7.7 million to ensure that we sustain the peace process."

Some of the expenses are relatively small. For example, at the request of the South Sudanese government, OCHA recently raised and paid $20,000 for the construction of an airstrip in Nabanga - a remote town on the border between Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, 7 kilometres from Garamba National Park where the rebel leadership is holed up. OCHA manages funds for the Juba Initiative Project, a mechanism set up to facilitate the peace talks and backed by a group of donors including Norway, Canada and Denmark.

Not satisfied with the prospect of an airstrip, the LRA has said it needs an additional $2 million before talks can continue. It wants the money ostensibly to fly 500 people - most of them local leaders from northern Uganda - to Nabanga, and to send fact-finding missions to South Africa, Sierra Leone, Argentina and other amnesty hotspots.

Wahlstrom said OCHA is raising fresh funds so that "people can come" to the peace talks and they are "paid for upkeep, that their hotel bills are paid". She described OCHA's work as "logistics and facilitation", acknowledging that it was "an unusual role".

OCHA spokesperson Stephanie Bunker subsequently explained that the $2 million demanded by the LRA could come out of the $7.7 million the United Nations is trying to raise, but it wasn't up to the world body to decide how the money would be used.

Uganda's Daily Monitor newspaper reported at the beginning of August that, up to that point, donors had rejected the LRA's budget for consultation as too expensive. But the paper also quoted the Chargée d'Affaires at the French Embassy, described as an EU spokeswoman, as saying: "The European Union has not shunned it at all. What must be put into clear perspective is that the EU respects and considers the mediation of the talks through Dr Riek Machar and the Government of South Sudan as the best way to have all such requests conveyed."

Machar, south Sudan's vice president, has played a key role in the Ugandan peace negotiations, and a recent reduction in his governmental portfolio could be one factor slowing things down. But the Monitor reported at the end of July that the LRA was also blaming the United Nations: "The rebels say although they are not in the talks with the Ugandan Government for monetary gains, the U.N. accounting office had not paid their allowances and consultation fees for one month. They say the allowances were approved by mediator Riek Machar."

When asked about reports that donors had rejected the LRA's request for $2 million, U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi was upbeat: "There are some financial issues that have arisen...on the funding of the consultations on mechanisms for the implementation of Agenda Item 3 [at the talks] on Accountability and Reconciliation. We hope that the parties and the donors will agree on a framework to support the consultations. It is up to the donors to determine the amount that they are ready to provide to support the process. The Special Envoy [for northern Uganda, Joaquim Chissano] is in touch directly with the LRA over this matter and we expect it can be resolved."

While the U.N.'s diplomatic and financial involvement in trying to end the conflict in northern Uganda is commendable, the unanswered question is how this is consistent with enforcing the indictments of the LRA's top leaders by the International Criminal Court.

"The [Ugandan] government has preferred to place stress on reconciliation instead of justice, in capital letters," the U.N. Security Council's president for August, Congo-Brazzaville's Pascal Gayama, said this month. But speaking in French, he added, "The leadership of the LRA is subject to prosecution by the International Criminal Court... They are not out of the woods." The French phrase "toujours dans les bois" also referred to how they remain hiding in the bush.

But the LRA leaders aren't the only ones shying away from the limelight. With regard to the latest sticking point, donors appear to be hiding behind the Government of South Sudan, and the United Nations behind the donors.

Will this dance turn out to be necessary diplomacy in the unwinding of a vicious conflict in which civilians were massacred, survivors' lips sliced off and thousands of children forced to work as soldiers and sex slaves? Or will the buck-passing and toying with the concept of amnesty prove just another shameful chapter in the sell-out of northern Uganda's long-suffering people? For now, it's the $2 million question.

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