Uganda delays deployment of peacekeepers to Somalia

NAIROBI, April 26 (AFP) — Uganda on Tuesday delayed for up to a week the deployment of a contingent of troops to Somalia, the vanguard as a regional peacekeeping mission there, officials said on Tuesday.

“We were supposed to deploy by 30 April (but) we have to delay a few more days because we have to put together kick-start logistics,” Ugandan army spokesman Major Shaban Bantariza told AFP in Kampala.

“A battalion of 800 men is ready and is doing exercises,” he said. “We may delay for some days, probably up to a week.”

On March 18, the regional seven-nation east African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) said the first deployment of two battalions of IGAD soldiers from Sudan and Uganda could be on the ground by the end of April.

IGAD is expected to eventually deploy as many as 10,000 troops to assist Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi and other transitional institutions to relocate from exile in Kenya to Somalia, officials say.

Precise details of the mission are yet to be released amid a bitter dispute over the composition of the force within the transitional Somali government.

Fierce opposition to the participation of neighboring countries Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya in the force prompted a bloody brawl in the Somali parliament, sitting in Nairobi, last month.

IGAD — which comprises Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda and nominally Somalia — has repeatedly announced that it would not let the Somali peace process collapse.

Somalia has been in chaos without any functioning central authority since the fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 turned the nation into a patchwork of fiefdoms ruled by warlords.