Army Sends Forces After ADF Rebels
Email This Page
Print This Page
The Monitor (Kampala)
November 7, 2002
Posted to the web November 8, 2002
Kampala
The UPDF has deployed several detachments of soldiers in the DR Congo to
flush out small groups of ADF rebels who are regrouping there.
The army spokesperson, Maj. Shaban Bantariza, said yesterday in a phone
interview that rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces were trying to recruit
Congolese and some Ugandans into their ranks.
He was reacting to international press reports that Uganda has sent two new
battalions of soldiers to the strife-torn Ituri region of northeastern Congo.
The reports quoted a small rebel group, the Ugandan-backed Congolese Rally
for Democracy-Liberation Movement (RCD-ML) that said a first battalion had
arrived and another was on its way.
"A first battalion of 750 men arrived in five trucks at around 3:00 p.m.
(1400 GMT) in the town of Mutwanga, in the western part of the Rwenzori
hills. Another was announced as being on its way," said Honore Adima
Shambuyi, an RCD-ML spokesman in a statement sent to AFP in Kinshasa late
Wednesday.
Kadima said Uganda had sent fresh troops to the region after it lost around
140 men in clashes with rebels in Ituri.
Bantariza, however, denied losing any soldiers in Congo fighting recently.
"We were not killed in those numbers in the Sudan, how can we be killed by
mere recruits, people who are just training?" he said. "Just ignore the
RCD-ML."
Bantariza said that the army has deployed some detachments of the UPDF Bunia
battalion to the areas of Mtwanga and Lume, closer to the footsteps of the
Rwenzori mountains on the Congo side where the ADF are trying to regroup.
He said UPDF Bunia battalion was far away and stretched and that the forces
in Mtwanga and Lume have been reinforced by forces from the Alpine Brigade,
based in the Rwenzoris.
He said two weeks ago the UPDF mounted a preemptive attack on the ADF camps
and that the rebels 'scattered' with any casualties on either side.
Ituri has long been a powder keg of unrest. Kampala sent troops to the area,
which lies close to Uganda, in 1998.
Uganda in late September withdrew most of the troops it had deployed in its
vast western neighbour. It left 1,000 troops in Congo's northeastern town of
Bunia at the request of the UN Observer Mission to Congo (MONUC) to help stem
clashes between different ethnic groups there.
On Oct. 15, another small Ugandan-backed rebel group said Uganda had
re-deployed a battalion in the Congo, defending its action by saying that
fresh fighting threatened its western border.
