In what is seen as an attempt to reach out to his political rivals ahead of his swearing in tomorrow, President-elect Yoweri Museveni is extending an olive branch to nemesis.
Accordingly, the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) boss Brigadier Charles Bakahumura is later today set to parade a group of top Peoples Redemption Army (PRA) who fled Uganda and reportedly engaged in subversive activities between 2001 and 2005.
Sources say members of the group, whose return from South Africa was negotiated by Brig. Bakahumura, belonged to the suspected rebel outfit that was reportedly operating in jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), trying to overthrow the government of Uganda.
The group of returning exiles, who also supported then FDC president Col Dr Kizza Besigye in the 2001 presidential elections, is led by Major Tom Mugizi, hitherto one of the top officials of the FDC Chapter in South Africa, who fled Uganda with Col. Anthony Kyakabale and Col. Samson Mande in 2001.
In 2003, while deployed in the DRC town of Bunia Maj. Mugizi, a former Intelligence Officer, defected from the UPDF together with a one Captain Mohammed Kiwanuka of the 35th Battalion.
Thereafter, it is said Maj. Mugizi and others fled to South Africa, where Dr Besigye, who was reportedly the ‘political leader of the PRA’, was also exiled between 2001 and 2005, while Colonels Kyakabale and Mande fled to Rwanda and later relocated to Sweden.
Then, in November 2005, then UN Special Representative to the DRC William Lacy Swing implicated the PRA as one of the foreign armed groups operating in the jungles in the eastern part of the vast and lawless central African country, but Mr Swing’s position was contested by the FDC through a petition to then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
By press time efforts to contact UPDF Spokesperson Lt Col Paddy Ankunda over the developments  were fruitless.
