Govt warns EU diplomat
By Mwanguhya Charles Mpagi
March 3, 2004
KAMPALA - A Security minister has complained to President Museveni and the ministry of Foreign Affairs about the head of the European Delegation to Uganda. Ms Betty Akech said yesterday that Mr Sigurd Illing's statements about the war in the north violated the diplomatic code of conduct.
The minister was speaking at the weekly government media briefing at Nakasero yesterday.
Ms Betty Aketch at yesterday's press conference (Photo by Willy Tamale).
"The complaints have been raised at the highest level," she said, adding that diplomats who over-step their diplomatic mission should be deported.
"There are no foreign missions anywhere in the world that just go into people's sitting rooms, bedrooms, anywhere into the toilets anywhere and do what they want," she said.
"They should not just enter everywhere into our politics; into our security."
She added: "If a Ugandan diplomat to the US started talking things about al-Qaeda, I don't think he would last 24 hours; he would face deportation."
The tirade came after Illing backed a parliamentary resolution declaring the north a disaster area, despite Cabinet's rejection of the motion.
Illing also told Members of Parliament that government should stop blaming the war in the north on the donors for not allowing an increase in defence spending.
Later, the army spokesman, Maj. Shaban Bantariza, unveiled a letter that, he claimed, Illing had secretly written to Lord's Resistance Army rebel leader, Joseph Kony.
Bantariza later accused the diplomat of trying to blackmail government into negotiating peace with Kony yet his own efforts to talk to the rebel leader had failed.
In a statement released this week, the EU delegation to Uganda said the letter to the rebels was not secret and that it had been copied to a team appointed by President Museveni to negotiate with the rebels.
At the briefing yesterday, the army spokesman said he was not out of order to attack the ambassador. "I am not just a presumptuous Bantariza that speaks on matters anyhow," he said.
"Please advise the ambassador to avoid getting in controversy with army officers. Ambassadors do not speak anyhow; the moment they do that they have perforated their diplomatic immunity," Bantariza added.
He also advised Illing to avoid "walking on quicksand." The diplomat was not available for comment by press time yesterday.
© 2004 The Monitor Publications
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister
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