NABANGA (AP): A final peace deal to end one of Africa's longest wars broke down Friday after a fugitive rebel leader failed to show up in a jungle clearing to sign the agreement and government representatives headed home.

Before leaving this remote area near the Congolese border, chief government negotiator Ruhakana Rugunda said his team was heading back to the Ugandan capital, Kampala, to await further instructions. Rebels and government negotiators had been gathered in a clearing since Thursday waiting for Joseph Kony, who hasn't been seen in public since 2006.

``He did not sign as expected so we're going back and will wait to be informed by the chief mediator of the next steps to be taken,'' Rugunda said.

When asked whether he believed Kony was committed to peace, Rugunda said: ``We are waiting for concrete evidence.''

Kony's notoriously vicious Lord's Resistance Army is behind a 20-year insurgency in northern Uganda. The rebels are known for cutting the lips off their victims, abducting child soldiers and turning girls into sex slaves.

Kony and four other members of the rebel high command wanted by the International Criminal Court have gone into hiding. As part of the final deal, Uganda has agreed to approach the ICC and request that the indictments be withdrawn. Any decision to drop the international charges would have to be approved by judges at the court, who would first want to be sure the rebels get a proper trial in Uganda.

Under the deal, those charged with serious crimes during the insurgency would be tried in a special division of Uganda's High Court. Those accused of lesser crimes would be judged according to northern Uganda's traditional justice system, known as Mato Oput.

Mato Oput is a style of mediation that involves a public apology from the offender, who must also give a payment set by local elders _ often in cattle or sheep _ to the victims, or bereaved. In return, victims agree to forgive the accused.

Some human rights groups condemn such punishment as too lenient.

But more than a year of talks between the government and rebels have not yielded much, and were marked by walkouts and accusations of sabotage on both sides.

U.N. officials estimate that the LRA has kidnapped 20,000 children in the past two decades, turning the boys into soldiers and the girls into sex slaves for rebel commanders.

If both sides reach a comprehensive deal, it will be a major breakthrough in pacifying the volatile region comprising northern Uganda, eastern Congo and southern Sudan. Rebels from all three nations operated across the borders with impunity for decades until a peace accord halted Congo's civil war in 2003 and southern Sudanese rebels joined Sudan's government in 2005.

The Lord's Resistance Army was formed from the remnants of a northern Uganda rebellion that began in 1986 after Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, shot his way to power.

Kony mixed northern politics with religious mysticism, declaring himself a Christian prophet fighting to rule this country of 26 million people by the Ten Commandments.