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Uganda to protest against U.N. Somalia report

Fri 17 Nov 2006

By Tim Cocks

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KAMPALA, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Uganda said on Friday it would complain to the United Nations over a report accusing it and nine other countries of arming and sending troops to back factions in Somalia's brewing conflict.

"It's all trash," Defence Minister Chrispus Kiyonga told reporters. "Uganda will now formally protest to the U.N. about this serious, negative and false report."

Kiyonga was reacting to a U.N.-commissioned report naming Uganda alongside Ethiopia as countries supplying arms, personnel and equipment to Somalia's weak interim government in its standoff with Islamists who control Mogadishu.

Other countries, including Libya and Yemen, were accused of supporting the Islamists.

The report said monitors had sent a letter to Uganda regarding the allegations but had received no response.

"No letter of inquiry from the monitoring group has been received by any Ugandan official," Kiyonga said. "We could not therefore have responded to a communication we never received."

He reiterated that Uganda was ready to send peacekeeping troops to Somalia under a plan by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) group of east African nations.

But they have not yet been sent there, he added.

"Uganda has not deployed any troops to Somalia," Kiyonga said. "Uganda has for over one year been on the ready to send troops for peacekeeping purposes (but this) ... has to await two critical clearances."

Uganda's parliament has to first approve the move, and the United Nations must partially lift an arms embargo on the Horn of Africa country, the minister said.

If the IGAD plan -- which the Islamists vehemently oppose -- goes ahead, Ugandan troops would be in the vanguard because most other IGAD countries border Somalia and fear being drawn into a wider regional conflict.

The Islamists have said any foreign troops on Somali soil will be regarded as enemies.

Many countries, included the United States, which backed warlords that lost Mogadishu to the Islamists in June, are keen to prevent Somalia becoming a radical Islamic state.

Somalia has been without a functioning government since the fall of former dictator Siad Barre in 1991 sparked the collapse of the country into a patchwork of quarrelling fiefdoms.

Some diplomats doubt whether Kampala would really want to commit troops to the forefront of a Somali peacekeeping mission, having little strategic interest in the Horn of Africa.

"The feedback we are getting from Kampala is that they don't want to touch that with a bargepole," one Western diplomat in the region said recently.

Source: Reuters, Nov 17, 2006

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