Uganda wants Rwandan renegades relocated

Uganda says it has asked the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to help resettle an undisclosed number of renegade Rwandan army officers in Uganda to a third country, the government-owned New Vision newspaper reported. An official of the UNHCR office in Nairobi told IRIN that the agency would first have to determine if the officers were eligible for refugee status before proceeding further. He said there were further discussions with the government underway to determine this. "That'll have to be looked at very closely," he said. The New Vision quoted a senior Ugandan official as saying on Tuesday that Rwandan Maj. Alphonso Furuma, who crossed into Uganda earlier this year, was among those it wanted resettled. Ugandan dissidents, lead by Lt-Col Samson Mande and Lt-Col Anthony Kyakabale, also fled to Rwanda in June and declared war on Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, the Kampala daily reported. It added that there had been similar defections from Rwanda, mainly middle-ranking officers. After two years of tension between the former allies, defence ministers of Rwanda and Uganda agreed on Monday that dissidents in each other's country should be dissuaded from activities that may endanger security and that they be moved to third countries with UNHCR help. In another measure to lessen tension, Uganda withdrew one army battalion from the Kikagati border point near Tanzania and redeployed them at Nzhungezi, 25 km away the newspaper quoted Defence Minister Amama Mbabazi as saying on Sunday. The measure followed a meeting Mbabazi held with his Rwanda counterpart, Emmanuel Habyarimana, in the southwestern Ugandan town of Kabale.