/ 1 January 2002

Ugandan president denies looting DRC riches

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Saturday that his country was not in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the purpose of looting mineral wealth there.

”Such claims are not true. As a nation we are not involved in the plunder of the Congo (DRC)… maybe there are some individuals who are doing that,” Museveni told an airport news conference in Tanzania, shortly before leaving for home after a two-day official visit.

”After all Uganda has a lot of mineral deposits, including phosphates, iron ore and gold, but has failed to exploit them due to lack of capital,” Museveni said.

Museveni pointed out that Uganda has 230 million tons of phosphate deposits, but needed at least $125-million to exploit the resources, and boasted that his country has among the world’s best high grade iron ore, as well as unspecified amount of gold deposits.

”If we have failed to dig these things in Uganda, where do we get the capital to dig minerals in a foreign land? This is absurd,” Museveni said.

He was reacting to a new UN report released on Friday, which stated that armies, militia and crime syndicates are wreaking havoc on DRC villages in an unabated quest to plunder the central African nation.

The report said that despite ceasefire agreements, warfare and gross human rights abuses often intensify in areas where a profit is to be made, mainly in eastern DRC near the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian borders and in regions where Zimbabwean troops helping the DRC government are deployed.

The report was released by a panel of six experts established by the UN Security Council to investigate the relationship between the civil war and natural resources.

The team found that ”in some places, entire communities have been uprooted by armies who are after riches, while rape and killings often accompany plunderers, who use forced labour to extract minerals and gems”.

In two months of research, the panel found that the plunder of diamonds, gold, copper, timber and coltan — a composite mineral used in cellphones and nuclear reactors — continued unabated.

Museveni arrived in Tanzania on Friday afternoon for talks with his counterpart Benjamin Mkapa which, he said, mainly centred on bilateral economic relations.

Museveni said sustained economic growth in Africa would be

realised through export-led production strategies.

He said Uganda, like Tanzania and Kenya, was now struggling to utilise fully the tax-free and quota-free export opportunity to the United States under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which could not be exploited by Uganda fully without a good and efficient transport system.

”We must have in place a railway system and ports that operate very efficiently,” Museveni added. – Sapa-AFP