Fear hangs over busy Uganda, DRC border

MPONDWE — The jagged, ice-capped Rwenzori Mountains stab at the sky above Mpondwe, a bustling border town in western Uganda.

Trucks move slowly and one at a time across a rickety metal bridge above the swirling, muddy Lhubiriha River and into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo where, traders say, profits can be found but fear lurks.

“We have no worries here, but our concern is the security over there,” says Henry Bwambale, a 34-yearold business leader in Mpondwe, gesturing to the west.

Traders tell of violent highway robbery and worse on the roads to the Congolese towns of Butembo and Beni, he says.

“We have heard of people being killed, hacked to death and homes torched. People are beheaded,” he says. Simon Mufalume, a 52-year-old Ugandan trader, no longer crosses the border himself, preferring to sell to middlemen. “Crossing to DRC to do business is risky,” he says. Recklessness, however, can be richly rewarded. “Basic items are expensive because we don’t have industries,” says Wilberforce Kanga, a 59-year-old Congolese businessman from Beni. “The traders who risk, and cross, make huge profits.”

The DRC - Uganda border region has a tradition of insurrection driven by ethnic divisions, political marginalisation and economic neglect.

But blame for much of the violence in recent years is put on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel group of Muslim fighters that evolved from a domestic force in the mid-1990s into a brutally destabilising militia operating in the borderlands around the Rwenzori Mountains. — News24