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Uganda Uganda's Other Neighbors--Sudan, Rwanda, and Zaire
Uganda's relations with its other neighbors were
dominated by
responses to serious domestic political conflicts within
Uganda
or a neighboring state that spilled over their common
borders.
After the NRM took power, the threat that it would support
likeminded radical guerrilla movements near the border in each
of
Uganda's neighbors except Tanzania tinged interstate
relations
with deep suspicion.
Relations with Sudan had been primarily concerned with
the
consequences of the Sudanese civil war for the first
decade after
Uganda's independence. The Ugandan government regarded the
war as
pitting Africans against Arabs and thus tended to be
sympathetic
to the southern desire for secession. Thousands of
southern
Sudanese refugees fled to Uganda. Following the assumption
of
power by a left-wing Sudanese regime in 1969, Obote tilted
his
loyalties toward the Sudanese government in order to
strengthen
his own radical credentials. After this war was settled in
1972,
Uganda's relations with Sudan became quieter. Many
southern
Sudanese took advantage of Amin's ethnic ties to southern
Sudan
to join the Ugandan Army and take part in its
indiscriminate
attacks on Ugandan civilians. When Amin was overthrown,
the
Sudanese soldiers, along with many Ugandan supporters of
Amin,
fled to southern Sudan. There they were joined by 200,000
Ugandan
refugees, mostly from northwest Uganda, during Obote's
second
presidency, when the new Ugandan Army took revenge on
them.
In 1983 a new phase began with the second Sudanese
civil war,
which was complicated in 1986 by an outbreak of fighting
in
northern Uganda between remnants of Obote's former Ugandan
army
and the NRA. Each government accused the other of
assisting
antigovernment rebels. After 1987 President Museveni
became a
mediator in an effort to arrange meetings in Kampala
between the
leaders of the warring Sudanese factions. In support of
this
policy, the NRM government announced that it would not
export
revolution and thus would not help the Sudanese rebels or
give
them sanctuary in Uganda. By 1990 the border had become
considerably less significant in disrupting relations
between the
two countries because Sudanese rebels controlled most of
it,
because the northern Ugandan rebels who had used Sudan as
a
sanctuary were largely defeated, and because most of the
Ugandan
refugees in Sudan had returned home. In early April 1990,
Sudanese ruler Lieutenant General Umar Hasan Ahmad al
Bashir
visited Kampala and signed a nonaggression pact with
Museveni.
Rwandans had started to migrate from their
overpopulated
country to Uganda in search of jobs early in the colonial
period.
Four years before Uganda became independent, a revolution
in
Rwanda in which Hutu agriculturalists took power from
their Tutsi
(Watutsi) overlords resulted in a mass exodus of Tutsi
refugees
into Uganda. Many remained in camps, hoping eventually to
return
home, but the Rwandan government refused to accept them,
claiming
the country was too overcrowded. During Obote's second
presidency
in the 1980s, the Ugandan government regarded them as
supporters
of the NRM. A crisis erupted in 1982 when local officials
in
southwestern Uganda forced 80,000 people of Rwandan
descent,
including many with Ugandan citizenship, to leave their
homes and
possessions. Refused entry into Rwanda, they were forced
to live
in refugee camps on the Ugandan side of the border, where
they
remained through 1990. Relations with Rwanda were again
strained
in October 1990, when Rwandans in the NRA joined a rebel
invasion
of northern Rwanda. President Juvénal Habyarimana accused
Museveni of supporting the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and
relations
worsened throughout the rest of 1990.
Uganda's involvement in rebel activity in Zaire almost
brought down the Obote government in 1966, although the
Ruwenzururu rebellion on the Ugandan side of the border
during
the 1960s attracted little support from Zaire. During the
late
1980s, however, when a radical Zairian group dedicated to
the
overthrow of President Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese
Liberation
Party (Parti de Libération Congolaise--PLC), became active
in the
same mountains, Mobutu accused the NRM of supporting it.
Remnants
of the Ruwenzururu movement established a working
relationship
with the PLC in 1987, and the NRM became the enemy of both
rebel
movements. As the PLC increased its attacks in Zaire from
its
sanctuary in the Ugandan Ruwenzori Mountains, Mobutu
responded by
helping former UPC politicians with close links to
Ruwenzururu
leaders establish an exile group in Zaire for the purpose
of
overthrowing the NRM government. Meanwhile, farther north
there
were intermittent clashes between Ugandan and Zairian
soldiers,
both as a result of the NRM's campaign to eliminate
cross-border
smuggling and over fishing rights in the lakes along the
border.
Large numbers of Ugandans, who had fled into Zaire as
refugees
during the Amin and second Obote governments, had begun to
return
to Uganda. But in June 1987, the United Nations High
Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) program assisting them was closed.
And in a
bizarre incident that further soured interstate relations,
Amin
attempted to return to northern Uganda through Zaire in
January
1989 but was recognized and held in the airport at
Kinshasa. In
the absence of an extradition treaty with Uganda, Zaire
allowed
Amin to return to his home in exile in Saudi Arabia,
despite NRM
demands for his return to stand trial. In September 1990,
Museveni and Mobutu agreed to cooperate in resolving
border
security problems, but despite this pledge the border area
remained unsettled for the rest of the year.
Data as of December 1990
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