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 Mike Thomson
CONGO鈥橲 FORGOTTEN WAR
Mike Thomson in Eastern Congo
The brutal war in the Democratic Republic of Congo which left between three to four million dead is supposed to be over, but you would not know it.
Thousands of people have been pouring into this camp for displaced people north of the regional capital Goma in recent weeks and the stories they bring with them are horrific.
鈥There were one hundred people killed that I saw myself, one hundred, and that is not even counting the dead bodies they made us throw down the wells.鈥 This woman lost her father and brother in an attack on her village by rebel militia.
Another man tells me about similar carnage that happened not far away. This time the attackers were members of the Congolese army itself. 鈥Rebels ambushed a Colonel of the army and after this they said they would attack all the population because they said we were directly helping the rebels against them. So, the army began to kill people inside my village, going from street to street to kill people without taking care whether they were rebels or not.鈥
The United Nation鈥檚 World Food Programme says that more than 50,000 people from three villages have been forced to flee their homes over the past month alone. A spokesman told me that in the past such people would return soon after but not anymore.
Camps like the one I am in, about thirty kilometres from the Ugandan border, are becoming permanent for the first time.听 In all, 200,000 people here now need food aid and 1,000 across the east are estimated to be dying of conflict related diseases every single day.
This is supposed to be a country at peace. In December 2002 a peace agreement signed between Congo鈥檚 President Kabila and various militia leaders brought an official end to the fighting. Many of the rebel commanders were given lucrative posts in the transitional government and most of their militia men were integrated into the national army.
Part of the problem has been that a combination of low wages for soldiers, only around a dollar a day, plus endemic corruption which often reduces that still further, means they do have enough to live on. As a result they go back to do what they have done for so long, taking what whey want from civilians at the point of a gun.
In 2005 alone there were more than forty thousand reported rapes or other serious sexual assaults in Congo, most of them committed by either rebel or government soldiers. Murders, kidnappings and robberies are also rife.
Few, however, face justice for their crimes in a country where the criminal justice system has, in many places, virtually collapsed. Those who are convicted of such offences can usually buy their way out of jail, many others simply offer to pay bereaved family鈥檚 the price of a coffin for the loved one they killed.
The government in Kinshasa still insists that it鈥檚 winning the battle against marauding militia gangs in the east. With the help of 17,000 UN peacekeepers, the biggest and most expensive force of it鈥檚 kind in the world, it claims to have demobilised around 150,000 rebels.
This still leaves an estimated seventy thousand armed militia still roaming the bush, some of them children as young as seven. As many as 10,000 of these are Rwandan Hutu militia known as Interahamwe, who fled here after their part in the 1994 genocide across the border which left up to two million people dead.
Congolese troops are currently involved in a new military effort to drive these viscous fighters from the forests that cover the border area, but they face a daunting task.
The first Democratic elections last year in more than four decades brought fresh hope to this trouble country, but for many here in the east, that optimism is already beginning to fade.
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