Thursday, March 01, 2007
Underlining the mammoth task awaiting the African Union (AU) mission, gunmen shot dead three people at the house of the director of Mogadishu's port, the latest of a wave of guerrilla-style attacks in the coastal capital.
A cargo plane dropped off 35 uniformed Ugandan officers early in the morning at the government stronghold of Baidoa, customs officer Ali Mohamed Adan said. Police officer Isak Hassan Warsame also said he saw the Ugandan officers land.
But Ugandan army Capt. Paddy Ankunda, a spokesman for the AU mission, denied any military personnel had left yet.
"There are no troops in Somalia," he said in Uganda.
Baidoa is the south-central trading town that the government used as a temporary base before ousting militant Islamists from Mogadishu in a December offensive backed by Ethiopia's military.
The town is expected to be a key rear staging area for the proposed 8,000-strong AU force, designed to replace Ethiopian troops who helped President Abdullahi Yusuf's government defeat the Islamists in less than two weeks.
The Ugandan peacekeepers are due to patrol Mogadishu, one of the world's most dangerous and gun-infested cities.
In the latest attack there, unidentified gunmen attacked the house of port director Abdi Jiinow on Thursday morning.
A reporter at the scene, Abdullahi Addow, said three people died -- one attacker, a bodyguard and a visitor to the house.
Uganda has kept the exact troop deployment date secret, nervous because insurgents who blast away almost daily at joint government-Ethiopian forces in Mogadishu have threatened to attack any peacekeepers or government allies.
The insurgents are suspected to be a mix of Islamist guerrillas and clan militia fighting for control of the city.
At a sendoff ceremony in southeast Uganda, Col. Peter Elwelu said the Ugandan deployment would have about 1,600 soldiers.
"We are waiting for equipment that is coming by water. One day from when it lands, we can go in," he told Reuters at a military barracks in Jinja, where President Yoweri Museveni was bidding his troops farewell.
Last year, Uganda denied witness accounts and a U.N. report that a handful of its personnel were inside Somalia. Ethiopia did likewise for months last year, denying almost daily witness sightings of thousands of its troops.
Source: Remaining Ugandan forces to arrive soon
A Somali security source, who declined to be named, said he expected the rest of the Ugandan contingent to arrive in the next 24 hours.
A soldier at Baledogle airport, the country's biggest military airfield, 100 km (60 miles) west of Mogadishu, said six Ugandans that his commanding officers said were soldiers in civilian clothes landed for a short meeting early on Thursday.
Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi and Burundi are also expected to send troops to bring the force to about half its planned strength of nine battalions comprising more than 8,000 soldiers.
As with its previous peacekeeping foray in Sudan's violent Darfur region, the AU is facing a shortage of money and equipment for its Somalia assignment.
"It's probably not going to be the best kind of peacekeeping mission we are going to see," a European diplomat said.
Somalia has been in anarchy since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
A well-funded U.S.-U.N. peacekeeping mission in the mid-1990s ended in failure and a bloody withdrawal.
Under pressure from abroad to make his government more inclusive, President Yusuf told parliament on Thursday a national reconciliation conference would be held on April 16.
Three thousand delegates -- drawn from Somalia's myriad clans and factions -- would take part in the meeting to be held in Mogadishu, he added.
Source: Reuters, Mar 01, 2007