{UAH} UGANDA'S NEW AFRICAN RAPID RESPONSE FORCE

Uganda’s new African rapid response force

January 23, 2014 by Lora Moftah in Africa.

Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) on September 28, 2013. (AFP/Getty Images)

If Uganda hadn’t already raised enough eyebrows with its robust military backing of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, its announcement that its armed forces are setting up a rapid response center to intervene in regional conflicts is sure to cause a stir. Indeed, it is Uganda’s response to the violence in South Sudan that is serving as a blueprint of how this force will function, with troops at the ready to be instantly deployed to trouble spots within Africa.

According to Col Felix Kulayigye, the Ugandan army’s political commissar, Uganda is looking to be a “provider of peace in the region” by equipping itself with the capability to rapidly intervene in conflicts. Speaking to Uganda’s Radio One station, Kulayigye notes:

No other country has done what we’ve done in South Sudan… In a few days we were on the ground to secure Juba airport and everybody else benefitted from that deployment – that capability is what Africa has been lacking.

It is an interesting response to the criticism of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s unequivocal backing of Kiir. Rather than getting defensive over Uganda’s compromised mediator status — something that was vocally decried by opposition leaders within the country — the government is literally going on the offensive and using their South Sudan response as a model for broader Ugandan regional involvement.

This will not sit well with those wary over Uganda’s already extensive regional military entanglements. The Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) is currently deployed in four different African states — including Somalia and the Central African Republic. The idea that the small, East African nation is equipping itself with the capability of intervening in even more situations should make apparent the Museveni government’s strategy of expanding Uganda’s international profile through military or “peacekeeping” engagements. And by transforming Uganda into an African military heavyweight, Museveni also ensures the longevity of his National Resistance Movement (NRM) party in a political setting that prizes external military involvement.

Kulayigye’s justification for the force — as a means to ensure that countries in the region would not have to “wait for Europe or the United States to do the deployment when Africans are dying” — adds another interesting dimension here as it plays off of widespread disillusionment with international (mainly Western-backed) mediation efforts on the continent. By framing this as a point of pan-African pride, Uganda simultaneously sidesteps the question of its own hegemonic ambitions while subtly reminding Western governments of its regional strategic significance (something it might be keen to assert after the sustained political outcry from Western powers around its Anti-Homosexuality Bill).

Whether Uganda can financially sustain this sort of extensive military engagement is another question entirely. But a winning gamble on Kiir would nonetheless affirm the credibility of the Museveni’s government’s major regional ambitions.

 

 

           Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
           Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"