WITNESS: In search of invisible borders in central Africa

Joe Bavier has reported on West and Central Africa for four years. He joined Reuters as Kinshasa correspondent in 2006. In the following story, he describes a trip to Central African Republic's porous eastern border with Sudan in the aftermath of a wave of raids by Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army.

By Joe Bavier

BAMBOUTI, Central African Republic (Reuters) - "We aren't in Sudan, are we? Because we're not allowed to go to Sudan."

The question, asked by an admirably rule-abiding aid worker, made me smile. Here in this forgotten corner of Africa, where simply finding an international border requires patience and 21st century technology, who would ever know we were here?

"Still in Central African Republic," I said, looking down at the GPS on my satellite phone. "I think."

A friend and colleague once said Central African Republic has one redeeming quality -- it's easy to find on a map. After all, the directions are in the name.

But its history shows how much this poor former French colony has been a victim of that geography.

Sandwiched between some of the world's most unstable countries, it has been variously crisscrossed by marauding fighters from Democratic Republic of Congo, coup-assisting Chadian mercenaries, southern Sudanese rebels, and Janjaweed militia from Darfur.

I was in the densely forested eastern borderlands on the trail of the most recent trespassers, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) -- rebels from northern Uganda who are led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony and notorious for using boys as child soldiers and girls as sex slaves.

SPACE INVADERS

In late February and early March, along a 100-km (60-mile) stretch of 'National Highway Number 2', the grandiose name of the overgrown dirt track that runs east from the capital Bangui to Sudan, the LRA kidnapped some 150 villagers.

They entered from bases in neighboring Congo and over 10 days of operations, they didn't fire a single shot.

"They knew there were no police, no soldiers here, so they did it in broad daylight. They stayed all day," Vincent de Paul Koumboyo, mayor of Bambouti, Central African Republic's easternmost village, told me of the day the LRA arrived.

"After two months, the authorities in Bangui sent people to carry out an investigation. They stayed 48 hours then left again," Koumboyo said.

The LRA's violent incursion into this remote area has raised fears of a new front being opened up in a tangle of interlinked conflicts involving Sudan, Congo and Uganda.

United Nations officials fear a possible joint military offensive by these neighbors against the LRA -- agreed in June as a strategy if the rebels do not commit to peace -- could push the Ugandan insurgents into sparsely populated southeastern Central African Republic.