In a decade of war, Biringiro Kamanutse has tried to go home four times – only to flee for his life each time. A few weeks ago, rebels attacked his village, killing and looting, even taking his clothes and cooking pans. Mr. Kamanutse and his family took shelter in a nearby village, but it too was attacked, so they trudged two days through the bush to reach a camp at Kitchanga, where up to 20,000 refugees are crowded in tiny huts of sticks and straw.
Biringiro Kamanutse and his youngest son at a displaced-persons camp in Kitchanga, Congo.— Erin Conway-Smith
While still in the bush, he heard politicians on the radio talking about peace and progress. “They say we can go home – it's safe, it's quiet,” he says. “But it has no connection to reality.”
For millions of Congolese, the brutality that plagues their daily lives is all too real – even if almost everyone else would just as soon forget about a conflict so devastating that some call it “Africa's world war.” With a death toll surpassing that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined, it is one of the bloodiest and longest-running struggles anywhere. Nobody knows how many people have died since the latest fighting erupted, but estimates range as high as 5 million, including those who have died from the illness and hunger it has caused. As well, hundreds of thousands of women, many of them still girls, have been raped; soldiers on all sides use sexual violence like a weapon.
The United Nations' largest active peacekeeping force – 20,000 soldiers from dozens of countries – has failed to halt the atrocities. In fact, there are those who argue that the peacekeepers sometimes make things worse.
A year ago, hope for peace soared when the government of President Joseph Kabila signed a pact with a key rebel group. Yet the lush green hills and forests of this starkly beautiful land are still in turmoil – caught up in an endless scramble for the vast mineral wealth that in little more than a decade has attracted invaders from seven nearby countries.
Despite the continued fighting, the government is trying to shut the refugee camps scattered across Congo's eastern provinces, where 1.4 million are homeless, including 900,000 displaced in the past year alone. But most people are too fearful to go home – with good reason.
Human Rights Watch has reported that at least 1,400 civilians, including many women and children, were killed in “horrendous abuses” by both government and rebel forces. In some cases, the attackers “slit their throats like chickens” or gang-raped them so viciously that they bled to death from their injuries. Those who survive are often abducted as forced labour.
And now there are fears that the situation will get worse. Not only is President Kabila trying to close the refugee camps, but June 30 will mark the 50th anniversary of Congo's independence – an occasion he wants to observe with the UN's blue helmets, if not gone, packing their bags.
The former rebel chief, Laurent Nkunda.— Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
Violence and corruption
In popular legend, Congo is known best as the fictional Heart of Darkness – even though Joseph Conrad invented the term to describe those who exploit it, not for the country itself. Stretching almost 2,000 kilometres from the Atlantic coast inland to the Rwanda border, the Democratic Republic of Congo is as big as Western Europe and famed for its incredible resources, forests and minerals ranging from diamonds and gold to copper and tin.
