By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis will meet slum dwellers and
refugees and call for dialogue between Christians and Muslims when he
visits Kenya, Uganda and Central African Republic next month, the
Vatican said on Saturday.
The trip, his first to
Africa, is fraught with security concerns and the pope will spend about
two days in each country and visit only the capitals.
Since his election as the first Latin American pope, Francis has met
the most needy on each of his 10 foreign tours. In Nairobi, he will
visit Kangemi, a slum that is home to 650,000 people.
He will also hold an inter-religious meeting and say a Mass at a university in the capital.
The Kenya stop had been in doubt in the initial planning of the Nov. 25-30 trip.
Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall was the scene of a
four-day siege in September 2013 that left at least 67 people dead in an
attack by gunmen of the Somalia-based Islamist group al Shabaab.
Last April, militants attacked the Garissa University
College in eastern Kenya, killing 148 people, most of them Christian.
In Uganda, Francis is scheduled to visit a home for the disabled in Nalukolongo, a suburb of the capital Kampala.
The last stop is Bangui, the capital of the Central
African Republic, where the centerpiece of his visit to a country
plagued by inter-communal violence is a meeting with Muslim leaders in
the Koudoukou mosque.
Violence surged in Bangui in
September after the murder of a Muslim man, and 77 people were killed.
Much of the violence in the capital has been driven by a militia known
as anti-balaka, which is largely Christian, and a mainly Muslim group
called the Seleka.
Thousands have died and hundreds
of thousands have been internally displaced since the Seleka briefly
seized power in the majority Christian country in 2013. They later
handed power to an interim government but still control swathes of the
north.
(Additional reporting by George Obulusta in Nairobi, Matthew Bigg in Accra, and Elias Biryabarema in Kampala)
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