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This paper addresses the impact of the oil exploration in the Rift Valley (East Congo) on the crisis in the country. It demonstrates that major new conflict has broken out in the Congolese area concerned, endangering the whole peace process for the Democratic Republic of Congo and making a renewed cross-border conflict involving Uganda and Rwanda at least a possibility.The paper further demonstrates that more general problems known from oil exploration elsewhere in Africa are not only unresolved but might never be resolved. The sharing of costs and benefits of oil development is a key issue in all oil producing countries. In Uganda and the Congo, this is not even close to being addressed. In Uganda the ongoing inconclusive debate on the political future of the country makes it impossible to determine who in the future will be responsible for the minutiae of oil development or who in the long term is set to benefit. In the Democratic Republic of Congo it is not even settled who runs the area concerned, and even if it was, the determination of local interests and their expression in any form of political process would remain completely open.The paper recommends that economic reconstruction in the Great Lakes can only take place in a beneficial manner if it comes from the bottom up, deriving from local economic activities and interests. This does not preclude the exploitation of the region’s natural resources; it means that the local population should be enabled to take decisions about such exploitation and should enjoy its fruits. What is clear that if oil exploration is ever to proceed, there must be another way than armed conflict to include the expression of local interests.
