First AU peacekeepers land in Somalia's Baidoa

BAIDOA, Somalia, March 1 (Reuters) A group of Ugandan army officers arrived in Somalia today, the vanguard of an African Union force being formed to help the interim government tighten its tenuous grip on the country.

The uniformed Ugandans disembarked from a cargo plane which landed at the government stronghold of Baidoa early in the morning, a customs officer told Reuters.

''Thirty-five officers from Uganda came out and the plane left,'' customs officer Ali Mohamed Adan told Reuters.

''I have seen Ugandan officers arrive in Baidoa airport,'' police officer Isak Hassan Warsame told Reuters.

A security source, who declined to be named, said he expected the rest of the Ugandan contingent to arrive in the next 24 hours.

The Ugandan government, which has pledged 1,500 troops for the mission, denied any of its soldiers had reached Somalia.

''There are no (Ugandan) troops in Baidoa. There are no troops in Somalia,'' said Ugandan army Captain Paddy Ankunda, spokesman for the AU mission. ''We're leaving next week.'' Baidoa is the south-central trading town which the government used as a temporary base before ousting rival Islamists from the coastal capital Mogadishu in a joint offensive with its Ethiopian allies.

The town is expected to be a key rear staging area for the proposed 8,000-strong AU force which will replace the Ethiopian troops who helped President Abdullahi Yusuf's government defeat the militant Islamist group in a two-week December war.

A soldier at Baledogle airport, the country's biggest military airfield 100 km (60 miles) west of Mogadishu, said six Ugandans his commanding officers told him were soldiers landed for a short meeting early on Thursday.

''They were wearing civilian clothes. The plane took off at 9:15 a.m. (1145 hrs IST) after they met military officers at the airport,'' said the soldier, who declined to give his name.

Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, and Burundi are also expected to send troops to bring the force to about half its planned strength of nine battalions, or 8,000 soldiers.

PEACEKEEPING MISSION As with its first peacekeeping foray in Sudan's violent Darfur region, the AU is facing a shortage of money and equipment for its Somalia mission.

''It's probably not going to be the best kind of peacekeeping mission we are going to see,'' a European diplomat said.

Somalia has been in anarchy since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, and a well-funded US-UN peacekeeping mission in the mid-1990s ended in failure and withdrawal.

Uganda has given no details of its troop deployment plans, aware that the defeated Islamists, who fire almost daily at the joint government-Ethiopian forces in Mogadishu, have threatened to attack any outside peacekeepers.

In Jinja, in southeastern Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni was expected to give his troops a formal send-off TOday.

Last year Uganda denied witness accounts and a UN report that said a handful of its personnel were inside Somalia.

Ethiopia denied numerous reports over several months last year that thousands of its soldiers were in Somalia -- until its helicopters, jets, tanks and troops won a swift victory over the Islamists alongside Somali government forces.

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