
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 16, 1994                   TAG: 9404180151
SECTION: NATIONAL/INT                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NAIROBI, KENYA                                LENGTH: Medium

UGANDAN LEADER SUSPECTED OF PROVIDING SUPPORT TO REBELS

Eight years ago, Defense Minister Yoweri Museveni of Uganda seized power in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, with the help of about 2,000 guerrillas, a force he recruited among Tutsi refugee families who had fled Rwanda to escape ethnic bloodletting.

Now some of the same guerrillas are on the verge of taking over in Rwanda, three years after crossing the border with an invasion force they had assembled in Uganda, using Ugandan equipment and enlisting Rwandans serving in the Ugandan army.

At the very least, Western diplomats and African specialists say, there is a special relationship between the Ugandan leader and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the mostly Tutsi rebels who are battling the Rwandan government, which is drawn largely from the majority Hutu population in Rwanda. Others, including Ugandan exiles, assert that the Ugandan leadership is directly supporting and financing the rebels.

Ugandan officials deny that they side with the rebels. ``We are not furnishing support,'' said Hope Kivingere, Museveni's press spokeswoman. ``Uganda has only one interest, and that is to see peace in the region.''

But with the Rwandan Patriotic Front closing the circle on Kigali, the capital, where government troops are reported to be in disarray and ministers have already fled, some Western diplomats are prodding Museveni to press his former aides and soldiers among the rebels to show restraint and agree to a United Nations-brokered truce.

Western diplomats say Museveni used his special position with the rebels before when he encouraged them to sign an accord last year that stopped the fighting for eight months while the Patriotic Front and the government tried unsuccessfully to call new elections and organize a coalition government.

Diplomats say there is a long history of collaboration between the Museveni government and the mostly Tutsi refugee families who fled to Uganda to escape Hutu uprisings that began in Rwanda in the late 1950s.

In all, about 200,000 refugees and their descendants have settled in Uganda, where in the early 1980s a few thousand joined Museveni's rebellion and, later, the National Resistance Army, which he formed when he took power in 1986.

According to a report on Rwanda this year by the Human Rights Watch/Arms Project, which is based in Washington, Rwandans in the Ugandan military began plotting an invasion of Rwanda in 1988. When they finally did assemble a force of 7,000, which crossed the border in 1990, nearly half of it consisted of soldiers who reportedly had defected from the Ugandan army. Many of these were Tutsi refugees, who took along their own weapons as well as land mines, mortars and recoilless cannons.

Moreover, the leaders of the invading force included two longtime military aides of Museveni.

by CNB