First official contact since 2008 with rebel leader on the run with his Lord's Resistance Army

The Central African Republic has held talks with the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, one of the world's most wanted men, urging him to surrender after eight years on the run in the bush of east Africa.

The negotiations between Kony and Michel Djotodia, the interim president of the Central African Republic (CAR), are the first official contact with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) led by Kony, since a round of doomed peace talks in 2008; then the Ugandan government failed to reach an agreement with Kony, who feared he would be turned over to the International Criminal Court to satisfy an arrest warrant against him.

"It's true, Joseph Kony wants to come out of the bush. We are negotiating with him," Djotodiatold the Guardian from Bangui, capital of the CAR. "He asked for food supplies and the government took care of that," added Djotodia, whose Seleka rebels seized the capital earlier this year.

The UN is debating whether to send troops to the country, which has slipped into near-lawlessness and whose 4.6m-strong population is policed by just 200 officers.

Kony, a self-declared mystic who claimed spirits had ordered him to seize power and rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments, has led the LRA for two decades, in which the group has terrorised communities across northern Uganda. His forces, who held sway through a potent mix of mysticism and brutal tactics of forcibly recruiting children and chopping off limbs, were reduced to just a few hundred fighters after being chased across the Nile in 2005.

Although its ranks have been depleted – with many commanders killed by Kony himself in fits or paranoia and rage – dense jungle and desert terrain have allowed the group to evade capture repeatedly.

Boosted by around 100 US special forces, a 5,000-strong African Union army has been combing the forests straddling the CAR, south Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the LRA has continued to ambush civilians while poaching elephants for ivory.

US officials expressed doubt that the new talks represented a long-awaited breakthrough. The US State Department said the LRA's top commanders had used "any and every pretext to rest, regroup and rearm, ultimately returning to kidnapping, killing, displacing and otherwise abusing civilian populations".

Francisco Madeira, the African Union's special envoy on the LRA, told the UN Security Council on Wednesday Kony was using the talks as a smokescreen to shift many of his fighters to the fragile north-eastern CAR. "Heightened [military] pressure forced the LRA to try [its] time-tested tricks of buying time by duping the CAR authorities into 'negotiations' to purportedly allow Kony and his LRA to 'surrender' and resettle in Nzako, CAR," he said.

"Many reports indicate that he is suffering from some serious illness, uncharacterised illness," Madeira added.

Earlier this year, a former child soldier who was part of Kony's inner circle told the Guardian the warlord had descended into a spiral of paranoia in recent months.

In the Ugandan district of Gulu, once the heartland of the brutal insurgency, news of the talks was met with scepticism and fear. "If [capturing Kony] means more former soldiers like me can come back home, then it is good. Otherwise he is a dangerous man; it is better if people forget him," one former child soldier said.

Regional activists have spent years trying to bring Kony and his commanders to justice, but his success in eluding capture has recently been the cause of much international lobbying.

Last year, the US advocacy group Invisible Children released a highly emotional Kony 2012 video, which went viral but prompted fierce criticism in Uganda.

Most recently, journalist-turned-explorer Robert Pelton asked for voluntary donations for his Expedition Kony – in which he pledged to track down the warlord, while keeping viewers updated with reality-TV style updates.