An African Union peacekeeping force for Somalia will succeed because Africans understand the conflict better than American forces did in a disastrous 1993 mission, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Friday, according to Reuters. Uganda is the first country in line to contribute to a peacekeeping force requested by Somalia's interim government after a two-week war in which it routed Islamist fighters with the help of Ethiopian forces. Museveni said he was "optimistic" about peacekeeping in Somalia, despite the failure of a U.S.-led U.N. mission in the early 1990s that ended when militiamen killed 18 U.S. soldiers. "Our peacekeeping is different from these Western countries," he told diplomats and journalists at the official launch of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 2007, which Uganda will host in November.
