DPA
by Playfuls Team
Friday, January 19, 2007
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Ugandan officials said Friday that the country's ruling party has sanctioned the deployment of troops in war-torn Somalia, a decision they said might go through as the party has the majority in parliament. Legislators from the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) sat in closed session Thursday to debate the future deployment of Ugandan soldiers to the Horn of Africa nation.
The NRM caucus members later unanimously agreed to stand with one voice on January 30, when a motion on the Somali troop deployment would be tabled before parliament, a spokesperson for parliament, Helen Kawesa told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
Uganda is one of the African states which has pledged to contributed to an African Union (AU) to provide battalions of troops to secure Somalia's transitional government, which was reinstalled towards the end of last year with the help of Ethiopian troops.
Somalia has been plunged into chaos and has been ruled but myriads of war-lords since the overthrow of its late military dictator Siad Barre a decade and a half ago.
Kampala says that a battalion of soldiers has been readied in preparation for the deployment but that the actual movement of the troops awaits approval by parliament.
Kawesa told dpa that the Somali deployment motion will likely sail through parliament under a majority vote as there are 205 NRM legislators out of a parliament of 332 members.
"They sanctioned the deployment. They came out with a resolution but they cautioned that the mission should avoid getting into problems. The resolution is most likely to be passed because they are the majority in the house," she said.
Source: DPA, Jan 19, 2007