From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Mon Jan 04 2010 - 23:57:24 EST
Fears mount of fresh clash over resources
By Barney Jopson in Kampala
Published: January 4 2010 17:58 | Last updated: January 4 2010 17:58
At the entrance to the wood-panelled ministerial corridor in Uganda’s
finance ministry is a polite notice on a gold plaque: “Please surrender
your firearms to security.”
It is a reminder of Uganda’s still recent militarised past – and an
unintentional warning that its oil discoveries risk another collision of
guns and money .
“What comes with money is the challenge of stability,” says Ezra
Suruma, a former finance minister and now an adviser to President Yoweri
Museveni. “There’s a tendency to focus on money and [to] forget that if
you don’t have stability the money is no use.”
The main security threat to Ugandan oil, most analysts say, comes from the
lawless Democratic Republic of Congo.
The biggest reserves in the Albertine Rift basin lie under Lake Albert
itself, which is bisected by a disputed border with the DRC.
On the opposite shore from Uganda’s nascent wells lie the badlands of
Ituri province. Ituri became a byword for bloody horror during Congo’s
1998-2003 war, as a cast of shadowy ethnic militias fought each other and
massacred civilians.
Some militias were backed by Uganda and, on at least one occasion, the
fighting spilled into Uganda. At its root were resources: land, timber and
gold.
As oil development races ahead in Uganda, while it is stalled on the
opposite shore, there is already talk in Congo of Uganda “stealing” its
oil from under the water.
Taimour Lay, a researcher with the oil advocacy group Platform, says there
is a danger of conflict emerging akin to that in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger
Delta.
“The Front Populaire pour Justice au Congo, an amalgam of militia groups
in Ituri, is already talking the language of oil, claiming it won’t stand
by as yet another natural resource is extracted without benefiting local
communities,” he says. “It won’t be hard for excluded groups in DRC
and Uganda to find opportunities for troublemaking.”
Uganda has set up a high-level security committee to handle oil-related
threats and it is building a new army base close to Lake Albert. But the
Congolese authorities are not likely to help stabilise the region.
The distant Kinshasa government exerts little control in Ituri and in 2007
several civilians were killed in border clashes involving the Congolese and
Ugandan armies, including a British contractor working for Heritage Oil.
Both Heritage and Tullow Oil bought exploration licences on the Congolese
side of the lake in 2006 – but Kinshasa is now disputing their validity.
A United Nations peacekeeping force has a patchy record in eastern Congo
– and it is likely to start to withdraw before the large-scale oil
production begins in Uganda in 2012.
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