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Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 10:59 PM
Subject: Kampala Rejects Amnesty Report On Ituri



"She named the Forces armees du peuple Congolais led by Jerome Kakawavu Bakonde, which controls the northeastern Ituri towns Aru and Mahagi, as a group that was still enjoying support from Uganda."


"The Ugandan government must take immediate steps to end its continued support of armed groups and the economic plunder which fuels the atrocities," she said.




Kampala Rejects Amnesty Report On Ituri


    
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UN Integrated Regional Information Networks 

October 22, 2003 
Posted to the web October 22, 2003 

Kampala 

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and the spokesman of the Ministry of Defence, Maj. Shaban Bantariza, have dismissed a new report by advocacy group Amnesty International, accusing the government of Uganda of continued involvement in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan released the report on Tuesday during a news conference in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, and called on Uganda to face up to its responsibilities to stop supporting armed factions in eastern Congo.

"The Ugandan government must take immediate steps to end its continued support of armed groups and the economic plunder which fuels the atrocities," she said.

The Amnesty report, documenting human rights abuses committed since the beginning of the year in eastern Congo's troubled district of Ituri, Orientale Province, said many of the atrocities recorded earlier in the year were still going on in Ituri and were becoming accepted because they were now commonplace.

"While the logic of peace is emerging in Kinshasa, the dynamic of war is still well rooted in Ituri," Amnesty reported. "Amnesty International's report chronicles the mass slaughter, rape, abuse and displacement of thousands of civilians during the first nine months of this year by various armed groups and militias."

Khan added, "Some of these armed groups in Ituri are still enjoying support from elements in the Ugandan military and its government".

She named the Forces armees du peuple Congolais led by Jerome Kakawavu Bakonde, which controls the northeastern Ituri towns Aru and Mahagi, as a group that was still enjoying support from Uganda.

The senior researcher at Amnesty for the Congo, Marcel Agpovo, said Uganda "still has a lot of economic interests in Ituri".

But the Ugandan government rejected the report. The Amnesty officials had earlier met with Museveni, who dismissed claims of continued support of armed groups as "politically fabricated allegations". Bantariza said that Amnesty's claims were "simply untrue".

"We are now fully behind the Kinshasa dispensation of bringing a political settlement to the problems of Congo," Bantariza told IRIN. "How can we now support armed groups who are enemies of that government?"

He said the claim that some Ugandan soldiers were still supporting Ituri militia groups was "impossible, because we don't even have any troops in Congo". He said the quality of intelligence in Amnesty's report should be put under scrutiny.

"Where did they get this information? There is a United Nations force in Ituri which does not have such information when it even has its own intelligence unit on the ground," he said.

He warned Amnesty against relying on hearsay or on the testimonies of members of the armed groups themselves.

"Certainly, they contact us and ask us for our support, but we refuse. But as to what they tell Amnesty - they are lying for their own ends," he said.

Khan said peace would never be achieved in Ituri if the perpetrators of war crimes were allowed to get away with it. "The people of Ituri cannot talk reconciliation and peace while perpetrators of rights abuses get impunity," she said.

Khan told IRIN after the conference that she had urged Uganda to take punitive action against "state officials whom we know are still involved in Congo".

"The Porter commission implicated some people. Yet we are still waiting for any of these people to be actually prosecuted," she told IRIN.

She said that no action had been taken yet against those named in Uganda's judicial commission of inquiry into the UN allegations of illegal exploitation of the Congo's natural resources.

On 14 February, Museveni convened a special cabinet meeting in Kampala to discuss a report, compiled by the commission of inquiry headed by Justice David Porter, on allegations that Ugandan army officers were involved in looting natural resources in the Congo.

The 211-page Porter report was submitted to the minister of state for international affairs, Tom Butime, on 31 January. It detailed the Ugandan army's role in the controversial plunder of the Congo's wealth by foreign armies.

In November 2002, the UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the DRC submitted a report to the UN Security Council accusing Uganda, among other countries, of exploiting the Congo's natural resources.

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