Uganda ready but wary of Somalia peace mission
Source: Reuters
By Tim Cocks KAMPALA, Dec 8 (Reuters) - U.N. endorsement of a plan to send African peacekeepers to Somalia to avert war has whipped up controversy in Uganda over its likely role as the first nation to send troops for such a mission. The U.N. Security Council this week approved a plan by the east African regional body IGAD to send peacekeepers to Somalia to avert a feared regional war and bolster the Horn of Africa country's weak transitional government. Kampala says it has trained a battalion of about 700-800 troops who are waiting for parliament, dominated by President Yoweri Museveni's government, to approve their deployment. No one is sure when that will happen or who will pay for it, despite what diplomats say is U.S. military backing, including training and military supplies to Ugandan special forces. Diplomats say the United States is preparing C-17 and C-30 troop aircraft to ship Ugandan troops and gear to the Somali government's sole base in its own country, Baidoa. But there are fears Ugandan soldiers will become automatic targets for Mogadishu-based Islamists who have vowed to attack any foreign troops and jihadists urged to do the same by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "Senior military commanders have told us they're not keen. No one is, except President Museveni, a few top brass and the Americans," a Western diplomat in Kampala told Reuters. But Ugandan army spokesman Felix Kulayigye said any doubts by military officials would have had to be voiced before cabinet approved the plan: "They are too late," he said. Some fear Uganda will be sucked in to a regional war between the Eritrean-allied Islamists who control much of southern Somalia and the Western- and Ethiopian-backed government. "Uganda's reservation is it doesn't want to take sides," said another Western diplomat. "But it still needs to support the transitional administration." SUDAN OPPOSITION Uganda, and initially Sudan, in 2005 were deemed most suitable to contribute troops because they were the only IGAD members not bordering Somalia and without obvious strategic interests there. But Khartoum, under pressure to accept U.N. peacekeepers to quell a bloody crisis in its violent western Darfur region, has since refused to participate. "On the same basis that we have rejected foreign troops in Darfur, we reject the deployment of troops in Somalia," President Omar Hassan al-Bashir told reporters on Friday. Sudan is seen by diplomats as sympathetic to the Islamist desire to spread sharia law in Somalia, as it did in Sudan, touching off a north-south war in 1983. Analysts say Kampala is close to Ethiopia and wants allies against Sudan's northern government, with which it has tangled via rebel proxies in years of insurgencies along their border. Strong U.S. support for the plan was a big reason Museveni committed himself to its latest manifestation, they say. Participants in Somalia's peace process in Kenya from which the idea emerged say Museveni first gave his support out of his friendship with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. But an African diplomat in Nairobi who follows Somalia said there were other formalities to be handled through the African Union that had to happen before any soldier sets foot in Baidoa. "You don't just deploy on your own," he said. "You cannot go as a peacekeeper and then fight a war." (Additional reporting by Alaa Shahine in Khartoum and Bryson Hull in Nairobi)
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