UGANDA-ZAIRE: New Border Conflict Flares Up

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Nov 18 1996 (IPS) - Footage of Rwandan refugees fleeing eastern Zaire has been appearing on television screens across the world but, just a short distance away, another conflict that has displaced thousands of people has received much less attention.

Since last week, an invasion from neighbouring Zaire has caused people in Ugandan border areas to flee further inland.

“The fighting has displaced an estimated 70,000 people from Karambi, Bwera, Nyabiyombu and Kisinga who have swarmed Kasese town,” Lilian Okech, a top administrator in that Ugandan town, told journalists over the weekend.

The displaced, mostly women and children, are from areas in southwest Uganda that were invaded by armed groups from across the border in Zaire.

Okech claimed that the attackers were Zairean-based dissidents originating from Kasese district, who were backed by Zairean soldiers and Rwandan ‘Interahamwe’, the Hutu militia who committed much of the killing during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

However, Zaire has denied that its troops had attacked positions in Uganda. “It is just a calculated tactic by Uganda to divert the attention of the international community away from the invasion of Zaire by its soldiers,” government spokesman, Boguo Makeli told journalists in Kinshasa over the weekend.

Zaire insists that neighbouring Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda back rebels in eastern Zaire bent on toppling Zaire’s ailling President Mobutu Sese Seko, in power since 1965.

The rebels, known as Banyamulenge, are ethnic Tutsis who arrived from present-day Rwanda and Burundi 200 years ago.

The attack on southwest Uganda was first reported in Kampala last week. Announcing the invasion, Dr Martin Aliker, Uganda’s minister of state for foreign affairs in charge of international co-operation, told a hastly-called press conference in Kampala on Nov. 13 that a combined force of Zairean and Ugandan rebels had attacked a Ugandan army platoon at Karambi, close to the border, and the Mpondwe border post early that day.

Sources in the ministry of defence in Kampala said later that 50 attackers were killed by Ugandan soldiers during the first two days of fighting. The army lost three soldiers and 10 others were wounded, according to a statement by the ministry of defence.

On Nov. 18, a top Ugandan army officer, Brigadier Yoramo Muvunge, said in Kampala that Ugandan soldiers had defeated the attackers, “killing one hundred of them.”

He said the invaders had fled back to Zaire, where they came from. “We shall deal with them when they come back,” he warned.

The insecurity in the area, some 250 kilometres northwest of Kampala, comes at a time when President Yoweri Museveni is battling with two other rebel groups operating in the north of the country.

It is fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), whose goal is to rule Uganda on the basis of the 10 Biblical commandments and trying to contain the West Nile Bank Front (WNBF), which is dominated by people who had formed the bulk of the army of ousted Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

WNBF leader Col. Juma Oris was himself a senior official in Amin’s regime.

Uganda charges that both groups are backed by neighbouring Sudan, while Khartoum counters that Uganda is supporting the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Military sources in Kampala reported Monday that reinforcements had been sent to the southwest.