Troops deployed against Karamojong raiders

The Ugandan army said on 15 September that it had deployed a battalion of (720) soldiers in the northeast of the country to counter Karamojong cattle raiding and civil unrest in which over 20 people have been killed since Thursday, news agencies reported. "We are raising another battalion mainly from the local defence forces, and we are also mobilising those already on the ground," 'The New Vision' government-owned newspaper quoted the Uganda People's Defence Forces spokesman, Phineas Katirima, as saying on Monday. Eight people, thought to be Karamojong, were killed on 14 September when an angry mob barricaded the Katakwi-Moroto road in Katakwi town, eastern Uganda, stopped a bus on which they were travelling, dragged them out and killed them, the paper said. The killings were reported to be in retaliation for an attack on 13 September by Karamojong pastoralists on a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) at Ngarium, Katakwi District. A group of 200 Karamojong "warriors" had overpowered the 40 Local Defence Unit personnel stationed at Ngarium, killed 15 people and stolen 500 head of cattle. "The Thursday attack infuriated the local Teso people, who later took the law into their own hands, barricaded roads and killed innocent Karamojong travellers in a revenge mob justice," Katirima said. A state of emergency was on 6 August declared by the council of Katakwi District, where over 80,000 people are forced to remain in camps for IDPs as a result of the raids. The government of President Yoweri Museveni has been criticised by MPs for failing to disarm the Karamojong. The government says, however, that the task of disarming the Karamojong is complicated by the flow of arms to rival ethnic groups along the Ugandan borders. "We want to disarm the Karamojong, but the challenge is that if we disarm them we cannot control the flow of arms along the border unless their neighbours in Kenya are also disarmed. We are talking to Kenya to also disarm the Turkana," AFP quoted the minister of state for internal affairs, Sarah Namusoke Kiyingi, as saying at a meeting of the parliamentary sessional committee on defence and internal affairs on 14 September. [for background information, see separate IRIN story of 1 August, headlined "Karamojong force over 80,000 into IDP camps "]