BY THE GUARDIAN REPORTER
9th December 2012
Calls UN peace forces a bunch of tourists
Uganda president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni yesterday made a spirited plea to his colleagues in the southern African Development Community (SADC) to go back to the ‘basics’ in resolving a running political stalemate in the DR Congo.
Terming the DRC debacle essentially historical, the Ugandan leader poured scorn on the UN peace keeping mission at the start of the SADC emergency meeting held in Dar es Salaam in which 14 SADC heads of State and government attended.
Museveni said the UN peacekeeping force in the DRC had become a dismal failure – and likened it to a bunch of tourists.
The state of politics DRC, Madagascar and Zimbabwe dominated the agenda of yesterday’s emergency summit meeting.
Museveni who flew into Dar es Salaam yesterday specifically to make his mark flew back almost immediately after the meeting venue, said he had since asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to form another special UN peace keeping force that would be bestowed with the mandate to better manage the return to normalcy in the DRC. Himself a long-serving leader in Africa, Museveni has proposed that conflicts in African countries first need to be addressed by all the stakeholders in the respective countries – and calling on the intervention of regional entities and the international community when all efforts at the level of local resolutions fail.
As things stand, Museveni further proposes that the buck still lies squarely on the shoulders of SADC whose member states he now requests to form a neutral force to keep peace in the country.
SOURCE: GUARDIAN ON SUNDAY
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