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Uganda, DR Congo head off dispute as river alters border
Randomly ceding huge chunks of territory, the Semliki River has changed course so much over the past half-century that it has transferred as much as 50 square kilometres of Congolese territory to Uganda. Photo/FILE
Posted Monday, November 9 2009 at 00:00
Information from the National Survey and Mapping Department reveals that DRC has lost more territory than Uganda.
“It is a situation of give and take, as the change affects one country at one point and vice versa, but at the delta, the river has given a lot of land to Uganda.
“The biggest effect is that the mouth of the river is some kilometres away. It is about 49 square kilometres,” said John Kitaka, acting Assistant Commissioner for Mapping.
Uganda and the DRC have previously clashed over the small island of Rukwanzi in Lake Albert.
In the same year, 2007, the Congolese army occupied a disputed border area in West Nile after moving their border posts four kilometres inside Uganda.
The clashes prompted Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Joseph Kabila of Congo to meet under Tanzanian mediation, culminating in the Ngurdoto agreement that provided for a joint commission to verify and define the common borderlines.
Although there is a committee with representation from each country that has met thrice, not much progress has been done on this stretch of land.
Ugandan officials said the DRC is yet to raise financing for marking the borders, whose description on paper by the colonial governments was never translated on the ground.
Acting Commissioner for Survey and Mapping Moddy Nsubuga Kajumbula said the marking could be done within 10 months if funds were made available.
Each country, he said would require $3m to fix the water boundary and erect new pillars northwards to a tree junction point with Sudan.
“We shall refer to the 1915 Anglo-Belgian agreement — a treaty which described the boundary — and retrace the boundaries from the original point.
“We are proposing to follow that description even where the river changed its course. We have special instruments that can do that,” Mr Kajumbula said.
The same agreement is also being used to redefine Uganda’s border with Rwanda in the Katuna wetlands.
As a result of severe rainwater shortfalls in recent years, people in the area have resorted to cultivating in the wetlands, impeding the natural flow of the river that separates Rwanda from Uganda.
As a result, the river has also changed course, leading to the dispute over the boundary and the water resources.
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