ECONOMIC, POLITICAL MANOEUVRES IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION
By Ignatius Bahizi – The last few weeks have seen tensions re-emerge between Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda. The most recent incident being what Uganda describes as an act of aggression by Rwandan soldiers accusing them of crossing into Uganda’s territory and kidnaping a Ugandan soldier.
However, Rwanda maintains that the Ugandan soldier had strayed on her territory, Uganda sent a protest note to Rwanda in that regard.
Under the new government of President Evariste Ndayishimiye of Burundi, efforts to restore the strained relationships between Rwanda and Burundi were started. Both countries had hitherto accused each other of backing their state enemies.
These efforts gave confidence that there was steady progress towards normalizing relations. While addressing senior members of his ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in April, President Paul Kagame said that his country was at peace with all the other countries except Uganda, her northern neighbor, a problem he said he could not comprehend.
A few weeks after that speech, his government accused Burundi of sponsoring an attack by a rebel group of Rwandan dissidents, the National Liberation Front (FLN) on the territory of Rwanda. Rwandan security quickly announced that they had managed to repulse the attackers, killed two of them and that the rest had fled back into Burundi.
A week after that said attack, grenades went off in Bujumbura, the Burundian business capital in two separate incidents that left some people dead and others injured.
Burundi on the other hand has always accused Rwanda of sheltering or protecting those who are alleged to have been behind the failed 2015 coup against the late president Peter Nkurunziza, as well as recruiting, training, and arming Burundian refugees who founded the rebel group RED-Tabara which is said to be based in DRC’s South Kivu.
It has been Rwanda’s long-held view that Burundi and Uganda also give support and sanctuary to her enemies like the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that has been operating in Eastern DRC for more than two decades, and another militia called P5 associated with the Rwanda National Congress (RNC), a political party based abroad.
Uganda has not said much about her problems with Rwanda, but President Museveni has previously mentioned that Rwanda security services have intentions of destabilizing Uganda, and have always sent her agents for espionage into the country, many of whom were arrested, some charged in court while others were deported after interrogation. Efforts to resolve the frosty relations between Uganda and Rwanda under the mediation of Angola and DRC never yielded fruit.
That is the contemporary anarchic situation defining relations in the three-member states of the East African Community and the incoming member DRC, all core stakeholders in the hostilities bedeviling the great lakes region of Africa.
Rwanda’s FDLR, FLN and P5, Burundi’s RED-Tabara, and Uganda’s ADF are all said to have bases in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and have all been accused of killing, maiming, and displacing thousands of innocent Congolese.
For lack of where to run to for safety, poor Congolese flee to the three neighboring countries to seek asylum, and the hosts claim the honour of hosting the desperate refugees.
Burundian President Ndayishimiye was in Uganda to attend Museveni’s inauguration in May and extended his stay in Kampala on a state visit, and had a meeting with Museveni. The two leaders discussed areas of cooperation, among them, working together on the construction of a road that would link both countries through Tanzania.
This appears like a deliberate plan to isolate Rwanda through whose territory the nearest road from Kampala to Bujumbura cuts, but informed by the fact that Rwanda can at any time make a unilateral decision to close her borders as it did with Uganda affecting the rest of the region.
Excited border communities at Mpondwe/Kasindi between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, this week witnessed presidents Yoweri Museveni and Felix Tshisekedi officiate at the groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of road infrastructures between the two countries. The three strategic roads will link Uganda to towns such as Goma, Beni, and Butembo inside DRC in order to ease trade between the two countries which has recently grown to millions of dollars.
This means that, if the Bunagana-Rutshuru-Goma road is tarmacked, all Congolese goods and services from Kenya’s port of Mombasa and Uganda heading to Eastern DRC through Rwanda’s Gisenyi border will be diverted to Bunagana where a one-stop border post between Uganda and DRC is under construction.
The effects of these infrastructure projects though pragmatic to Burundi, Uganda, and DRC, and which are in line with the regional agenda to ease trade connectivity, may well not be welcomed by some regional players and may create another security dilemma for the entire region.
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