Bartamaha (Kampala):- Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Wednesday called for financial support to increase his country’s troop levels in the African Union force in Somalia.
Uganda is the mainstay of the AU Somalia force, AMISOM, and has pledged to send in more soldiers for the mission charged with protecting the war-torn country’s embattled government.
“We can bring any reasonable number that our brothers and our sisters ask us to raise, but they must bring the money and they must bring the equipment,” Museveni said at a meeting with a UN Security Council delegation in Kampala.
“We have got the experience, we have got the history, we have the tradition as a fighting force,” said Museveni, a former guerilla leader who came to power in a 1986 coup.
“The question is finding the money…,” he added.
The UN delegation, which later left for south Sudan, made no pledges about propping up Uganda’s troop reinforcement.
Last week, Kampala warned that its commitment to international peacekeeping could be undermined after a UN report accused its troops of war crimes during the DR Congo conflicts in the 1990s.
Museveni called the report published last Friday “lies”.
“I am told that in these international groups there are fiction writers and some of them should have prizes for literature,” he said. “They just sit down and compose a story.”
“These fiction writers should look for other subjects.”
However, Ugandan army spokesman Felix Kulayigye said Monday the country will not withdraw troops from Somalia in spite of the charges in the UN report.
Museveni in July said he would boost the Somalia contingent after Al-Qaeda-inspired insurgents in the Horn of Africa country claimed bomb attacks that killed 76 people in Kampala that month.
Uganda was the first country to send forces to Somalia in early 2007 and currently has some 4,300 of the 7,000 soldiers serving with AMISOM, with the rest coming from Burundi.
The force is the only obstacle barring the Islamist militant Shebab fighters from a total takeover of the capital Mogadishu, where they have confined government forces to a few streets.
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AFP
