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/ 26 February 2006
President Yoweri Museveni on Saturday won re-election in Uganda’s first multiparty polls since 1980, but his main rival rejected the results as opposition supporters clashed with police. Museveni was declared the overwhelming victor in Thursday’s landmark polls with nearly 60% of the vote.
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/ 25 February 2006
Uganda’s private Monitor Group media company complained on Saturday that its website and radio station are being jammed to prevent the independent release of partial results from this week’s elections. The firm said it was warned by Ugandan authorities to stop compiling and issuing returns from the country’s multiparty polls.
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/ 23 February 2006
Ugandans flooded polling stations on Thursday to cast ballots in landmark elections dominated by a bitter battle between President Yoweri Museveni and opposition leader Kizza Besigye. Hundreds queued patiently, and not so patiently, in huge lines at many of the nearly 20 000 open-air voting centres organised for the nation’s first multi-party elections in 26 years.
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/ 22 February 2006
President Yoweri Museveni has warned Ugandans not to be influenced by foreign meddlers, in a speech that closed an election campaign criticised by human rights groups for government harassment of the opposition. Opinion polls suggest Museveni could have difficulty capturing a majority in Thursday’s vote.
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/ 21 February 2006
A Ugandan court on Tuesday charged a member of the country’s security forces with murder in the shooting deaths last week of two opposition supporters at a rally site. The election campaign has been punctuated by sporadic violence and opposition claims of rampant state intimidation are shared by human rights groups.
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/ 20 February 2006
Uganda’s riot police fired tear gas and a water cannon at opposition supporters gathering on Monday at the final pre-election rally for presidential candidate Kizza Besigye. About 2Â 000 supporters had gathered in central Kampala, with riot police standing by. Young men in the crowd taunted the police, who responded with tear gas.
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/ 19 February 2006
Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has defended his bid for re-election after 20 years in power, saying he is running in next week’s polls because he needs more time to stabilise Uganda, build democracy and national unity, and defeat terrorism. ”I need … the power of the state to help solve people’s problems,” he said.
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/ 13 February 2006
Unknown gunmen fired on Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s motorcade in a weekend attack in the country’s restive north-east, but no one was hurt, officials said on Monday. The attack, which appeared to be an act of banditry and not an assassination attempt, occurred late on Saturday in Uganda’s Karamoja region.
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/ 10 February 2006
His rebel group is one of world’s most notorious, reviled for an incongruous mix of religion and brutality, but Joseph Kony, the chief of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, is a mystery to most. For nearly 20 years, the elusive guerrilla supremo’s fighters have terrorised vast swathes of northern Uganda with an unholy blend of murder and wanton destruction.
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/ 8 February 2006
One-by-one the words, bizarre and horrific, spout from the mouth of Alice as she recounts the terror and abuse she suffered as a child slave for Uganda’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army. ”They cut off three [people’s] heads and I was forced to use them as stones to hold the saucepan,” the 17-year-old said, describing her punishment for trying to run away.
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/ 27 January 2006
Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni marks two decades in power this weekend, less than a month before elections seen as a key test of his once-sterling but now tarnished democratic credentials. Since winning the respect and admiration of the West with enlightened economic and social policies, he has now run afoul of democracy advocates with increasing intolerance of dissent.
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/ 26 January 2006
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Thursday that he was ready to move his troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to fight Ugandan rebels. Museveni said he had asked the DRC government and the UN peacekeeping force to allow him to send troops to fight guerillas of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in the DRC.
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/ 20 January 2006
Two thousand heavily armed Sudanese tribesmen have driven 65 000 heads of livestock across the border into a wildlife reserve in Uganda in search of water and pasture for their herds, in a bid to survive the searing drought gripping East Africa, Ugandan officials said Friday.
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/ 16 January 2006
A judge sentenced a Rwandan rebel on Monday to 15 years in jail, a week after convicting him for killing eight tourists from the United States, Britain and New Zealand and a Ugandan tour guide who were on a gorilla-watching trip in 1999. High Court Judge John Bosco Katutsi passed the sentence after Jean-Paul Bizimana, alias Xavier Van Dame, appealed for lenient punishment.
Uganda’s main opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, was released on bail and greeted about 12 000 cheering supporters outside the courthouse where he is on trial on charges he says were fabricated to keep him out of next month’s presidential election.
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/ 28 December 2005
Ground troops and a helicopter gunship attacked a group of at least 35 rebel fighters in northern Uganda, killing 20 insurgents, an army spokesperson said on Wednesday. Three other rebels were captured and the rest fled into the bush following the Tuesday evening attack, said Lieutenant Chris Magezi.
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/ 19 December 2005
Uganda’s detained opposition leader was expected to appear before a military tribunal and a civilian court on Monday for the start of two trials on charges that could result in a death sentence. But Kizza Besigye’s lawyers said they would not join him at the military court because Uganda’s High Court has ordered it to suspend the proceeding.
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/ 12 December 2005
A Ugandan court on Monday refused for a third time to release detained opposition leader Kizza Besigye, as a judge set a trial date for next week for him to face treason and rape charges. Besigye, seen as President Yoweri Museveni’s top rival in elections set for March, has remained in prison since mid-November.
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/ 30 November 2005
The deputy chief of Uganda’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) said on Wednesday the rebels are ready to talk peace, breaking the group’s penchant for secrecy and drawing a cautious response from the goverment. Vincent Otti, the number two of elusive LRA supremo Joseph Kony, said his boss had authorised him to make the call for a negotiated end to the brutal nearly 20-year war.
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/ 16 November 2005
Police blocked roads leading to court on Wednesday as crowds gathered ahead of a bail hearing for a top opposition leader charged with treason. A day earlier, at least one person was shot dead in rioting by Kizza Besigye supporters protesting his prosecution on charges of treason as well as concealment of treason and rape.
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/ 16 November 2005
Ugandan police and troops firing live and plastic bullets fought running battles with protesters angered by the arrest on treason charges of the president’s main political rival. Kizza Besigye appeared in court on Tuesday, a day after his arrest. Elsewhere in Kampala, his supporters ransacked businesses and burned tyres.
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/ 15 November 2005
Ugandan police have arrested a major opposition leader and charged him with treason, saying for the first time they suspect him of links to the notorious rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. The arrest on Monday touched off protests that police put down with tear gas, rubber bullets and a water cannon.
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/ 21 October 2005
Thousands of government officials, diplomats, supporters and relatives gathered on Friday for the state funeral of Milton Obote, whose presidency was a brutal chapter in Uganda’s troubled history. The state funeral was held a day after current President Yoweri Museveni laid a wreath on the casket of his former foe.
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/ 21 October 2005
The threat posed by biological weapons such as anthrax must be taken seriously by both African governments and African scientists, warned a meeting of international experts in Kampala in Uganda this month. Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park recently recovered from an outbreak of anthrax among wildlife there.
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/ 20 October 2005
Uganda on Thursday sought approval from its neighbours to send troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo to hunt members of the Lord Resistance’s Army (LRA) seeking refuge there, Foreign Minister Sam Kuteesa said. ”The LRA is a terrorist organisation which has been operating out of Sudan for the last 10 years, now they are moving into DRC which brings a new dynamic,” Kuteesa said.
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/ 18 October 2005
The body of former Ugandan president Milton Obote arrived home on Tuesday for a state funeral to tears and jeers over the late leader’s legacy, which left the nation deeply divided. Torn between remembering Obote as a national hero or despot, Ugandans grieved and rejoiced as the white government-chartered twin-propeller cargo carrying his body landed at Entebbe at 12.45pm.
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/ 11 October 2005
The Sudanese government has for the first time agreed to allow Ugandan troops to pursue members of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in all parts of southern Sudan, Uganda’s army said on Tuesday. In a deal reached last week, Khartoum lifted restrictions on Ugandan military operations against the LRA in southern Sudan as long as they are coordinated with its army.
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/ 11 October 2005
Milton Obote, Uganda’s first prime minister and two-time president known for his brutal repression that led to the deaths of 500 000 people, died on Monday at a South African hospital, officials said. The Ugandan People’s Congress said Obote (80) died on Monday afternoon after being hospitalised for several weeks.
He claims to be God’s right hand man, but for the past almost two decades he has unleashed hell on the people of northern Uganda. Joseph Kony, a self-styled spiritual leader and chief of the rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is now also believed to be the object of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.
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/ 29 September 2005
It’s a cold, wet Sunday evening outside the Little Highbury pub. Inside, patrons are glued to a huge television screen showing an eagerly awaited football match between two English Premier League teams: Arsenal and Chelsea. Yells, curses and sighs of relief punctuate the proceedings.
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/ 28 September 2005
At least 4Â 000 children who were among some of the tens of thousands abducted by the Ugandan rebels from the north of the country cannot be traced, a Ugandan human rights group said in a report obtained on Wednesday. The report by Uganda Human Rights Commmission also accuses government forces of torturing civilians in the war-ravaged region.
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/ 23 September 2005
The deputy chief of Uganda’s notorious rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Vincent Otti, is seeking political asylum in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda’s defence minister said on Friday. Kinshasa has yet to make any decision on the matter, the minister, Amama Mbabazi, told reporters in Kampala.