Uganda wants to go into DRC
2006-01-27 09:26
Kampala - Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni on Thursday offered to re-invade the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to hunt down suspected Ugandan rebels who killed eight Guatemalan United Nations peacekeepers there this week.
"Uganda is ready to go back to the DRC. If the Congolese government and the UN want us to deal with this issue, we shall deal with it," he told a rally in Kampala's Independence Square to mark the 20th anniversary of his rebel movement's seizure of the capital in 1986.
Museveni has made similar suggestions since October when members of Uganda's notorious Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) slipped across the border into the DRC from Sudan but has been repeatedly rebuffed by the both the United Nations and Kinshasa.
"We told the UN that they should allow us to go and deal with the LRA in Congo because we know how to fight those criminals," he said. "They didn't listen to us (and) the other day I saw that they had killed some of their people."
UN patrol ambushed
Museveni referred to an ambush on Monday of a UN patrol seeking LRA rebels in the DRC's Garamba National Park in which the eight Guatemalan peacekeepers were killed and five others seriously wounded in a four-hour gunbattle.
The United Nations, which says 15 rebel gunmen were also killed in the battle, has not officially identified the attackers as members of the LRA although UN sources say they were almost certainly part of the group which has waged a nearly 20-year war against Museveni's government in northern Uganda.
Museveni's latest offer came just a month after the Hague-based International Court of Justice found Uganda guilty of violating the sovereignty of the DRC when it sent troops into the east in 1998 ostensibly to crackdown on Ugandan rebel groups operating there then.
Those troops stayed for five years.
The peacekeepers ambushed on Monday were members of the 17 600-strong UN mission in the DRC, known as Monuc, that is deployed across the vast central African country to help it emerge from war and move towards democratic elections by the end of June.
They had been carrying out the latest of a series of reconnaissance missions to track down LRA rebels in the Garamba park in the far northeast of the DRC, where the Kampala government says the rebels have rear bases in the Haut-Uele district.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed, thousands brutally attacked and some 1.6 million people, about 80% of the population, have been driven from their homes in fear of the LRA, which is known for its brutal treatment of civilians.