OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kampala | Friday 11.20am
SOME 40 Libyan soldiers have flown into Uganda — uninvited — in a “premature” bid to impose peace in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, a Ugandan minister said on Friday.
The Libyan foreign ministry announced on Thursday that “Libyan forces have arrived in Uganda to form the vanguard of African forces who will keep the peace and oversee the ceasefire” in the DRC, where a civil war has sucked in troops and militias from seven other countries.
The Libyan contingent “has taken a position between the Ugandan and Congolese forces,” the ministry added, but without saying how many Libyan troops were involved, or where they were deployed.
“There are about 41 or 42 of them,” Ugandan State Minister for Defence Stephen Kavuma said, adding that they arrived on Tuesday and are still in Ugandan hotels. “Of course, we advised them that their coming is premature,” he said. “We were not expecting that they would come at this time, but we knew they were coming because they had to get clearance, and we cleared them to land so we could find out what was happening.”
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose troops are fighting alongside the DRC rebels trying to topple President Laurent Kabila, signed a peace accord with the DRC president in April in the Libyan town of Sirte during a conference sponsored by Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi, but it has so far failed to halt the fighting.
The rebels — ethnic Tutsis, disaffected soldiers and opposition politicians — launched their insurgency in August last year with the backing of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, although Bujumbura continues to deny that its troops are across the border.
Kabila’s army won support from Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Chad. However the Chadian contingent was withdrawn on Wednesday and Thursday. — AFP