Aweys Osman Yusuf
Mogadishu 12, Dec.06 ( Sh.M.Network) – The only African country that volunteered sending peacekeeping troops to Somalia has officially declared that it will not deploy troops to the volatile country at a moment when sporadic skirmishes and insecurity prevail in the country.

AU Forces

Uganda has reconsidered its stance of sending troops to a country where powerful Union of Islamic Courts administer central and southernmost of Somalia and contradicted any foreign intervention in the country where the transitional government remains largely tenuous.

Ugandan state minister for foreign affairs, Oryem Okello, said Uganda’s military forces should not go to Somalia unless security progressed and the threat of war in Somalia was reduced.

As the Ethiopian backed-government and Islamic Courts clashed for two days around Dinsor, an Islamist base, 120 km south of Baidoa, the Ugandan government stresses that it fears its troops reach in Somalia will only make matters worse.

Uganda and Sudan that were the only Intergovernmental Authority on Development, IGAD, member states reckoned to be the candidates of troop offering states have rebuffed sending the 7,000 to 8,000 African peacekeeping missions expected to secure the government institutions in Somalia.

Okello said the Ugandan troops are coached for peacekeeping mission, not to fight along side with the Somali government militias against the Union of Islamic Courts.

There reports indicating that the United States government is coercing the Ugandan government to get involved in Somalia’s peacekeeping mission to find military might balance or fight with Islamists that sized the capital, Mogadishu, nearly six months ago.

Islamists expanded its military authority into fresh areas of the country after June this year, vowing they would grab and rule whole Somalia according to Islamic Sharaih.

Last week members of Ugandan parliament turned down the idea of sending troops to Somalia, but President Yoweri Museveni and few of his backers and members of the parliament endorsed the motion of deploying Ugandan peacekeeping forces to Somalia to fortify the frail government led by president Abdulahi Yusuf who demanded thousands of international peacekeepers at his inauguration ceremony in 2004.

Somalia has had no efficient government since 1991 when tribal warlords toppled former president Siad Barre and then turned on one another, plunging the country into political anarchy and civil wars.

Shabelle Media Network Somalia
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