By Joe Bavier KINSHASA, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Ugandan rebels are holding some 90 children they abducted from schools during raids last week on villages in remote northern Congo, the United Nations' children's agency UNICEF said on Monday. Fighters from Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) attacked villages on both sides of the porous border separating giant neighbours Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, Congo's U.N. peacekeeping mission and Sudanese authorities have said. The LRA, led by the reclusive self-styled mystic Joseph Kony, has led one of Africa's longest-running guerrilla wars against the government in Kampala. They are notorious for abducting children to use as child soldiers and sex slaves. UNICEF said around 90 children were taken from primary and secondary schools in two villages attacked on Wednesday. Earlier reports had said around 40 children were taken. A village chief and two Italian missionaries were also abducted. "UNICEF demands the unconditional release of the abducted children," Julien Harneis, UNICEF's field operations chief for eastern Congo, said in a statement on Monday. "These children were taken from their schools. UNICEF is very concerned that they will now be forced to fight or support fighting, putting their lives at risk," he said. LRA representatives at peace talks in the south Sudanese capital Juba, where mediators are trying to cobble together a new peace deal, denied any role in the Congo attacks. Two years of peace talks in south Sudan between the LRA and the Ugandan government collapsed in April when Kony, who is wanted for war crimes by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, failed to sign a final peace deal. The LRA has been successfully driven out of northern Uganda but continues to carry out raids in Congo, Sudan, and Central African Republic from bases in Congo's Garamba National Park. In June, Uganda, Congo and Sudan agreed to coordinate military efforts to stamp out the 20-year LRA rebellion, which worsens instability in a remote, mineral-rich region of Africa. The Congolese army, with the logistical support of U.N. peacekeepers, has already deployed several hundred troops to areas around the Garamba park as part of a military build-up aimed at boxing in the rebels and stopping attacks on civilians. The U.N. mission, MONUC, says it is a containment operation. LRA representatives say it could endanger peace moves and have vowed to repel any attack on their positions. MONUC is already heavily deployed in Congo's violence-hit eastern borderlands and opening a new front against Kony's highly mobile bush fighters could further stretch its peacekeeping operations in the vast, former Belgian colony. Experts also doubt the capacity of Congo's ill-disciplined army to take on Kony's guerrillas on their own terrain. Northern Uganda's two-decade civil war forced around 2 million people from their homes and destabilised neighbouring parts of oil-producing south Sudan and mineral-rich east Congo. (Editing by Louise Ireland and Alistair Thomson)
People wait after filling a form for a melamine contamination test at the Taiwan Department of Health for milk powder they bought in Taipei September 22, 2008. Taiwan has banned further ...
