Uganda: Border Wars

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November 20, 2005: President Yoweri Museveni is increasingly seen as just another dictator. He seized power in 1986, and plans to run for president again next year, refusing to allow opposition candidates to stand against him.

November 18, 2005: The army disputed UN and Congolese claims that Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels had left the Congo. Uganda belives some LRA, under the command of Vincent Otti, remain in the Congo. Otti is the LRA's deputy leader, second to Joseph Kony. The UN and Congo have repeatedly sent troops into the area, , including along the Congo-Sudan border. The last thing the Congo needs is a Ugandan military strike across the border.

November 17, 2005; In western Uganda, at least 300 civilians, and 51 members of the Congolese Revolutionary Movement, fled across the border from the Congo. UN peacekeepers and Congolese border are moving along the Ugandan border, disarming, often by force, rebels. In Uganda, the army disarmed the Congolese rebels it came across.

November 15, 2005; the army reported that another LRA senior commander, Maj. Joseph Opio, had surrendered. Opio had been under intense military pressure and had accepted the Amnesty program. The government uses these surrenders to promote the amnesty program, while insisting that the most senior LRA leaders (like Kony) are criminals. This is an attempt to induce surrenders but also further fracture the LRA.

November 14, 2005: Rioting broke out in the capital after the rest of the main political rival, Kizza Besigye, of president Yoweri Museveni. Besigye returned from exile last month, in the belief that Museveni was going to allow political opposition. That is apparently not the case.


November 12, 2005: Ugandan and Sudanese troops are operating together in southern Sudan, to hunt down Ugandan LRA rebels.

November 5, 2005: LRA leader, Joseph Kony, and a small number of followers, are believed to have crossed into the Congo.