East Africa nations pledge regional peace force
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KAMPALA, Uganda (Reuters) -- East African nations have pledged to set up a regional armed force as part of a wider continental rapid reaction unit to help in peacekeeping and anti-terrorism campaigns, a Ugandan minister said on Wednesday.
U.S. intelligence officials have long had concerns about the potential for attacks in east Africa, following twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. They blamed the attack which killed more than 200 people on al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda also claimed a suicide bombing at an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan resort of Mombasa, which killed 15 people, and a failed missile attack on the same day in 2002 on an Israeli jetliner taking off from Mombasa airport.
"The force will be a brigade comprising 4,000 troops -- one of five in the continent as spelt out by the African Union," State Defence Minister Ruth Nankabirwa told Reuters in Kampala.
African Union (AU) military chiefs agreed last May to put regional forces such as the proposed east African brigade in place by 2005, before establishing a multi-national peacekeeping force for the continent by 2010.
The European Union announced on Wednesday it would donate 250 million euros ($318.6 million) to assist peacekeeping activities on the war-plagued continent.
AU Commissioner for Peace and Security Said Djinnit welcomed the pledge, saying that a lack of money often delayed the deployment of peacekeepers to war zones.
"Because of the absence of coordination and lack of resources, it sometimes takes six months to deploy peacekeeping force and by then the situation changes," he said in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
The east African force would be mobilised on a need-to basis, Nankabirwa said. Its planning headquarters will be located in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
The minister could not give any details of the composition of the force or how it would be formed.
The agreement emerged after a seven-day meeting of regional defence chiefs from Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Comoros, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Madagascar in Jinja, 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Kampala.
With fragile peace efforts in Sudan, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Liberia and elsewhere, there is international pressure on the African Union to take more of a lead in peacekeeping in the continent's troublespots.
The defence ministers plan to meet in Addis Ababa in April to finalise the plan.
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