Regional ministers urge AU to demarcate int'l boundaries among member states

KAMPALA, Nov. 19 (Chinese media) -- Ministers from 14 African countries have urged

the African Union (AU) to demarcate international boundaries among member states

in a bid to reduce the increasing number of boundary conflicts, a top government

official said here on Wednesday.

Kasirivu Atwooki, Uganda's minister of state for lands told reporters that

member countries under the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for

Development (RCMRD) resolved that international boundaries among African states

need to be redrawn.

"This is one thing we need to undertake so that boundaries are well marked

to avoid unnecessary conflicts," he said flanked by Hussein Farah the Director

General of RCMRD.

Farah said the colonial masters did not carry out the actual mapping and

surveying but just signed legal instruments describing where the boundaries

should be.

"Our task now is to accurately determine without any bias exactly where

these boundaries are," he said.

Several countries in Africa are facing boundary disputes like

Ethiopia-Eritrea, Kenya-Uganda, Uganda-the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The ministers were attending the 6th conference of ministers of RCMRD in

Entebbe, 40 km south of Kampala. The eight-day conference ended on Tuesday.

It drew delegates from Botswana, Comoros, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi,

Mauritius, Namibia, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and

Zambia to devise means of mobilizing funds for quality surveying.

RCMRD was formed under the auspices of the United Nations Economic

Commission for Africa and the African Union to provide services in surveying,

mapping, and remote sensing to its member states.