Guinea has agreed to send hundreds of troops to Somalia to bolster the African Union’s peacekeeping force in the country after Somali insurgents claimed responsibility for blowing up nightspots in Uganda during the World Cup, killing 76 people.
The announcement, made on Friday, came during the 15th African Union summit meeting in Kampala, the normally peaceful Ugandan capital, which was deeply shaken by the bombings last week.
More than 50 heads of state are expected to attend the meeting, whose theme is maternal and child health and development in Africa. The attacks have threatened to overshadow the gathering, and the troop announcement offered an early indication of how the African Union intended to respond to the deadliest strike by Somali insurgents on a neighboring country.
The troops from Guinea — a battalion in all — are expected to join a separate force from Djibouti, making for the mission’s first deployments from predominantly Muslim countries. Jean Ping, chairman of the African Union Commission, called the new troops a “major boost” for the peacekeeping force in Somalia, and said it could push the number of soldiers on the ground to close to 10,000.
The Shabab, Islamist insurgents who control much of Somalia, said the World Cup attacks in Kampala were retaliation for the involvement of Ugandan troops as the backbone of the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia.
The peacekeeping mission has been there since 2007, helping to prop up a Western-backed transitional government that would almost certainly fall without the outside support.
The insurgents have been enforcing their harsh version of Islam in Somalia — banning music, bras and soccer — and have been fanning a religious war against the peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, two predominantly Christian nations.
The Shabab have at times called the peacekeepers infidels and accuse the Ugandan troops of committing crimes against Somali civilians. The African Union has been widely criticized as shelling residential areas indiscriminately.
Since Guinea and Djibouti are predominantly Muslim nations, the choice to send their troops to Somalia may have been an attempt to help neutralize tension.
“We welcome them,” Felix Kuliagye, a Ugandan military spokesman said. “Religion plays a key in acceptability.”
The African Union summit meeting in Kampala is still officially supposed to focus on maternal health and public policy.
African Union member states pledged in 2001 to increase healthcare spending to 15 percent of their national budgets, but this year only three countries are expected to meet that goal, according to public health advocates.
Activists are using the attention of the meeting in Kampala to voice their concerns by staging mock debates, perhaps the first at an African Union summit meeting and a testament to the region’s passionate and creative civil society.
But in this city, now besieged by security forces, the original focus of the conference may be lost.
“We are calling on leaders to be serious this time,” said Beatrice Were, a South African public health advocate.
“Look at how they react to the terrorist attacks here in Kampala. Our leaders should act the same way towards AIDS,” she said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS