By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 28 (Reuters) - The top U.N. human rights official warned on Wednesday of romanticizing Uganda's brutal Lord's Resistance Army and said peace negotiations should focus on surrender terms for its top leaders.

The International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, in 2005 indicted four LRA leaders on charges of killing, sexually abusing, looting and abducting children, mainly from the Acholi people in northern Uganda.

Before and after the indictments, there have been on-and-off peace talks with the group, the latest initiated by the government in southern Sudan, where LRA operatives have also created havoc.

"I think it is very important not to romanticize the LRA as all of a sudden the political champion of the rights of the Acholi people that it terrorized for 20 years, kidnapped their children," Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told a news conference.

"So I think there is a certain amount of revisionism in transforming what is essentially a quite well-organized, very well-armed criminal enterprise into a political interlocutor with whom we should have great hope of yielding to a peace settlement," she said.

Arbour, a former Canadian Supreme Court justice, said talks needed to focus on "the terms and circumstances of their surrender so they can come and address the charges against them in The Hague."

The LRA pulled out of peace talks with the Ugandan government in Juba, southern Sudan, last month, citing security fears. But it has agreed to a truce that was set to expire on Wednesday.

LRA deputy commander Vincent Otti, who is under indictment, told Reuters by satellite telephone from his hide-out in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that he had no intention of renewing the truce but would not take offensive action.

The cease-fire, signed in August and renewed last December, raised hopes of an end to a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 1.7 million in northern Uganda.

Arbour, responding to comments in Uganda and elsewhere that the ICC indictments have hindered the peace process, said the LRA had been active for 20 years without a prospect for peace.

"So for those who now say it is the ICC indictments that are an impediment to peace, I say 'you have a very short memory,'" Arbour said.

In her visit to the east African country a year ago, Arbour also criticized the Ugandan military's abuses in squalid camps for civilians, designed to protect them from the LRA. (Additional reporting by Tim Cocks in Kampala)

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