Dangerous Discovery.(oil exploration in Democratic Republic of the Congo)

If there is one thing that the Democratic Republic of the Congo arguably doesn't need, it's oil. The country's northeast Ituri province, abutting Uganda and Rwanda, has been a hellish killing field for the last four years. Fighting between as many as a dozen tribal groups has killed some 50,000 people. Some of the violence stems from the rival-ry between the majority Lendu and the minority Hema tribes; some has been fomented by Ugandan and Rwandan proxy armies. But much is about naked greed: Ituri is a trove of gold and timber.

Now comes another log for the bonfire. A small company named Heritage Oil, controlled by a British businessman named Tony Buckingham (thought by many to be a former mercenary, a description he denies), says it may have found black gold in an area straddling the Uganda-Congo border in the Great Rift Valley. A report by an independent engineering consultancy, Scott Pickford Associates, says there is a 10 percent chance that 1.2 billion barrels of oil are located in the immediate vicinity of Heritage's first test well in Uganda. In comparison to Nigeria's reserves, such a find would be a drop in the well. But in this volatile, impoverished region, barren and wasted by war, the mere possibility of striking oil is enough to spawn wild rumors and conspiracy theories--and even threaten a fragile peace. "Everyone is dreaming of oil, even if it's not there," says a U.N. official in Ituri.

Officially, the war in Congo is "over." A new transitional government, headed by Joseph Kabila, has taken office under a South Africa-brokered accord. A 4,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force is to be-gin patrolling Ituri this week. Tribal enmities remain, however, and are playing into the Heritage drama. Hema chief Kahwa Mandro says he fears marauding bands of Lendu will massacre his people and take their land, which lies on the Congo side of the geologic formation where Heritage is drilling. In June he approached Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Kaddafi for help; Kaddafi agreed to give Mandro "humanitarian assistance" for his people, according ...