[allAfrica.com] [Africare] Uganda Dragged Into Missile Saga The Monitor (Kampala) NEWS March 23, 2004 Posted to the web March 23, 2004 By Alex B. Atuhaire Kampala Government has denied a report in an American newsletter, that it supplied the missiles that shot down the plane carrying the slain presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in 1994. The report "Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now!" which also accuses UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan of covering up the matter, was published in the March 6-7 edition of Counterpunch, a political newsletter. According to Counterpunch, the missiles that shot down the Falcon jet carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi were bought by Uganda from the then-Soviet Union in 1987. The author of the Counterpunch report, Robin Philot, told The Monitor in an e- mail yesterday that the information in his article was mainly based on the infamous report done by French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière. "The report is damning for Uganda and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni," Mr Philot wrote in his article. "The missiles used to shoot down the plane were the property of the Ugandan Army. Uganda bought them from the Soviet Union in 1987." However, Defence minister, Amama Mbabazi dismissed the allegations when contacted for comment yesterday. "It's not enough for people to make blanket statements," he told The Monitor by telephone. "Let them produce details." The minister said the authors of Judge Bruguière's report did not contact Uganda for comment. "You can't make a statement of fact if you have not contacted us and we have not given our side of the story," Mr Mbabazi said. The Counterpunch repeats allegations, made in the Bruguière report, that the then-rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front was involved in the shooting down of the jet. "The ownership of those missiles points directly to the fact that the so-called RPF rebels were ranking members of the Ugandan army until the day they invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990," the article says. "Paul Kagame had been Uganda's Chief of Military Intelligence and benefited from Ugandan (sic) until he took power in July 1994," the newsletter says. Although it is publicly known that Uganda supported the RPF during its war against the Habyarimana regime, this is the first time the country is being publicly linked to the shooting of the jet, which sparked off the genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were killed. Although it has not been made public officially, details from Bruguière's 225- page report, leaked by the French newspaper, Le Monde have accused President Paul Kagame of Rwanda of ordering the shooting of the jet. Rwanda vehemently denies the allegations and in a recent interview, Mr Kagame counter-accused France of complicity in the genocide. Counterpunch alleges that the perpetrators of that attack knew what would happen, as did their "principal backers", the United States and the United Kingdom. The newsletter alleges that unclassified internal Clinton Administration documents show that immediately after learning of President Habyarimana's death, Prudence Bushnell of the American Embassy in Kigali wrote to the US secretary of State, Warren Christopher in Washington: "If, as it appears, both Presidents have been killed, there is a strong likelihood that widespread violence could break out in either or both countries, particularly if it is confirmed that the plane was shot down." The newsletter report is critical of Mr Annan, who in 1998 commissioned an independent inquiry into UN actions during the Genocide, for cover up. The report alleges that while the report from that inquiry states that the two presidents were killed in a plane crash fired by missiles, the official UN story was that "the plane fell out of the sky." "That probably explains why the black box disappeared in UN offices for 10 years," Counterpunch reports. UN officials said preliminary tests on a black box found in the UN headquarters in New York recently after 10 years was not from the jet that was shot as it came in to land at Kigali International Airport.   =============================================================================   Copyright © 2004 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). =============================================================================