Kampala — Dissident UPDF officer Col. Samson Mande has denied that he and Lt. Col. Anthony Kyakabale are fighting the Uganda government.

In a statement sent to The Monitor, Mande said that the People's Redemption Army (PRA) is a creation of Col. Noble Mayombo, the chief of military intelligence.

"Col. Mayombo almost caused a full-scale war between Uganda and Rwanda on allegations that Rwanda had helped us to form [an] organisation called the PRA to wage an armed struggle to overthrow the regime in Kampala," Mande wrote in a statement dated Nov. 23, 2002.

"This is the usual way of creating imaginary enemies in order to justify spending a lot of money through the Ministry of Defence under cover of classified expenditure," he says.

The army maintains that Kyakabale and Mande formed the PRA to fight the Uganda government. The two fled to Rwanda in 2001.

Last November, army spokesman Maj. Shaban Bantariza said the two were reorganising elements of the defeated Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in western Uganda.

Mande says in the statement that an international verification team has failed to prove the existence of PRA.

Bantariza yesterday said that PRA had run out of time and were trying to come clean.

"PRA is a reality. It is not a creation of Col. Mayombo," he said on phone. "It is well known in Ituri. Even in Kigali, they know it."

Bantariza added: "But if they have now denied it [PRA], may the Lord bless them."

Mande also denied dealing with Joseph Kony's LRA rebels in northern Uganda or the ADF.

He said they did not intend to join or aid any organisation that involves itself in terrorising Ugandans.

Mande said they were persecuted in UPDF: demoted and left undeployed without explanation and detained without trial. He said they were denied the right to exercise their political conscience.

He said they fled Uganda in search of freedom. The Uganda government, he argued, should get the right information about them from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other diplomatic missions in Kigali.