The UN's new International Criminal Court has issued its first arrest warrants against five leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group that has spent 19 years slaughtering peasants and kidnapping children in northern Uganda.

Under the court's sealed warrant system, the identities of the five men will not be made public until they have been captured. It is, however, considered certain that Joseph Kony, the LRA's self-professed mystic leader, is among them.

"They have issued arrest warrants for five people," said William Lacy Swing, the UN special representative in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mr Swing said that the notifications for the arrests were sent out last week to the governments of Congo, Uganda and Sudan, where the LRA rebels operate from a series of hidden bases.

The Hague-based ICC, the first permanent treaty-based international criminal court, prosecutes individuals for crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.

It was asked to consider the northern Ugandan conflict in January 2004, by President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court's chief prosecutor formally applied the court's pre-trial chamber for arrest warrants in June. Unlike other tribunals, the ICC has no time limit. Its indictments remain in force until the suspect is tried, dies or runs out of hiding places and gives himself up.

Mr Kony and his lieutenants are believed to be hiding in the mountains of southern Sudan. The rebel army was originally given support by the Sudanese military during its conflict with Uganda in the 1980s.

The LRA has since engaged in a mission to overthrow Mr Museveni, a southerner, who took power in 1986. It has vowed to oust the Museveni government and replace it with one based strictly on the Ten Commandments.

The militia has, however, struggled with the fifth - 'Thou shalt not kill' - and is held responsible for thousands of deaths and maimings.

Mr Kony's gang has reportedly kidnapped more than 30,000 children from their homes at gunpoint. Boys are forced to become soldiers. Girls, as young as eight, after forced to become sex slaves for fighters.

Widespread stories persist of how the unwilling conscripts are forced to club friends and relatives to death before drinking their blood or eating their boiled flesh.

The LRA received international notoriety in 1996 when it abducted 152 teenage girls from St Mary’s College, a boarding school in northern Uganda. Although nuns pursued the 200 armed men and 109 girls were released, the "prettiest" were taken as "wives."

The LRA has been operating bases in both northern Uganda and southern Sudan from where they launch brutal attacks on villages in both countries.

Nearly 2 million people, around 90 per cent of the population of the three main northern provinces of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader, have fled their homes for the shelter of government refugee camps to escape the army's nighttime raids. These too have become a target for rebel attacks.

Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said: "This is a very historic development."

"Victims have been suffering at the hands of the LRA for near than 20 years in Northern Uganda."

He said, however, that he hoped Mr Moreno-Ocampo would also investigate the Ugandan army, which is accused of abuses against civilians during its war with the rebels.

"It’s not as simple a situation as the LRA being the only force out there that needs to be brought to justice," he said.