Uganda’s army announced Tuesday that troops had been dispatched to the town of Bunia in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to combat local militias.
The action came as the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group seized territory farther south in the adjoining North and South Kivu provinces.
“We have deployed our troops in Bunia,” Ugandan military spokesperson Felix Kulayigye told AFP.
“Massacres were being committed by some militia groups and we agreed with our Congolese counterparts to carry out joint operations to save lives.”
Bunia is the capital of Ituri province, where Uganda already has thousands of troops fighting alongside DRC forces against a terrorist organisation called the Allied Democratic Forces, which has been linked to the Islamic State group.
Credit: REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
However, in the highly complex dynamics of the war-torn region, Uganda has been accused by UN experts and others of working against DRC interests by helping the M23 and controlling part of the country’s significant mining resources.
Uganda has categorically dismissed the charges.
Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s armed forces chief, warned militiamen in Bunia on Saturday of an attack unless they surrendered.
“I give all soldiers in Bunia exactly 24 hours to surrender their guns! If they don’t, we’ll declare them enemies and fight them,” Kainerugaba wrote on X.
Kainerugaba is notorious for inflammatory social media posts, including threats to attack neighbouring Kenya and Sudan, but he insists that some of his tweets are intended in humour.
Analysts are concerned that the new outbreak of violence in eastern DRC would lead to a replay of the situation in 1998 when Uganda and Rwanda supported rebel groups in the region, which provoked the Second Congo War, which lasted until 2003, involving various African countries and killing millions of people due to violence, disease, and starvation.
