[Ugnet] Joint Plan to Fight Great Lakes Rebels

UGANDA has been supported by Rwanda and Congo to blacklist a local rebel movement as a terrorist group, placing it in the league of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. The three countries have at the same time resolved to fight rebel groups jointly.

The People's Redemption Army (PRA), which the government links to former military officers, was the subject of a joint security meeting in Kigali a fortnight ago. It is said to be associated with ex-Uganda People's Defence Forces officials Colonels Samson Mande, Anthony Kyakabale and Edison Muzoora, and is now placed in the same category as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which has killed thousands of people and abducted many children who are forcefully conscripted into its ranks.

The Kigali meeting, attended by Ugandan officials including the Minister for Foreign Affairs Tom Butime, agreed to address the security concerns of each of the three countries, with Rwanda emphasising the need to disarm the Interahamwe militia.

The meeting was the fifth in a series between officials of Uganda, Kenya and the DRC. The first two were held in the Washington, US, one in New York and another in Kampala. In the meetings and follow-up negotiations, Kampala has also been represented by its Defence Minister, Amama Mbabazi.

Rwanda's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charles Muligande and President Paul Kagame's Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Dr Richard Sezibera, represented Kigali.

The PRA and the Joseph Kony-led LRA are now on the US government's list of terrorist groups together with Al Qaeda, which was accused of the twin bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 in which over 250 people died.

However, other sources in Kampala questioned the very existence of the RPA because, apart from its commanders, little is known about its soldiers and operations. No one has ever owned up to belonging to the group, even though Kampala has since 2001 said such a group exists in Congo and is bankrolled by a neighbouring state. The group has also never made any attacks inside Ugandan territory, and the men the government alleges are its leaders were relocated a year ago from Rwanda to Sweden.

Diplomatic sources, however, said that the RPA existed and that is why Uganda mentioned it alongside the Allied Democratic Front (ADF) as a threat to its security. The government says that the group also operates in the jungles of Congo. The ADF is remembered for the burning of more than 80 students of Kichwamba Technical Institute in 1998 and used to be active between 1996 and 2000, when the UPDF routed it.

However, reports say the group has started regrouping at bases in eastern Congo, the same area where the PRA allegedly has bases. The Ugandan envoy to Rwanda and Burundi, Adonia Ayebare, said the meeting was aimed at improving security in the three countries.

"The meeting was aimed at working out a regional framework on security and development issues aimed at supplementing other initiatives that are in place," said Mr Ayabare.

Each of the three countries has submitted names of rebel groups that are threatening its security. Uganda named the PRA and the ADF, while Rwanda named former fighters of President Juvenal Habyarimana's Rwandese Armed Forces (ex-FAR) and the Interahamwe, ALIR, FDLR and FOCA.

The meeting also agreed on closer co-operation in order to foster development. The meetings are sponsored by the Washington.

Previous agreements between the countries have been bilateral, either between Uganda and Rwanda, or Congo and Uganda, without involving all three parties in a single session. As a result, agreements such as the Lusaka one of 1999 and the Pretoria one of 2002 involving Rwanda and DRC have not yielded much. They have all failed to implement the disarming of rebel groups in the DRC.

The three countries are finally coming together after many years of political tension and acrimony. In 1996, a combined force of Ugandan and Rwandan forces fought alongside rebels led the late Congolese president, Laurent Desire Kabila to oust dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who has since died. But in 1998, less than two years after Kabila's forces took power, he fell out with his two backer countries, leading to another round of conflict in the region.

Uganda and Rwanda financed rebels to oust Kabila but the Congolese president sought the intervention of Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Chad to fight off the rebels. Uganda was later to fall out with Rwanda, with each country supporting a different rebel group, leading the two armies to go to war in the eastern Congolese city of Kisangani. Since then, relations between the two have never been the same, despite efforts by the two governments to mend fences.

However, Mr Ayebare told The EastAfrican that relations between the three countries have greatly improved and that the conflict of 1998 was now a thing of the past. "We recently signed a tripartite agreement in Kigali on regional security in the Great Lakes," he said.

President Kagame said last week that unless the UN peacekeeping force in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (Monuc) is given clear mandate to disarm the Rwandan Ex-FAR and the Interahamwe militia, security in the region will remain shaky.

"As far as we are concerned, the problem we have with the UN or some European countries is the way they see our problems and how they would want us to solve them," he said during a press briefing.

[Ugnet] Joint Plan to Fight Great Lakes Rebels

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