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Chased Then Robbed: Another Day In Congo's Katanga
Reuters
Congo
August 23, 2005
First gunmen chased them, then the army robbed them: for residents in Congo's Katanga province situations have a tendency to go from bad to worse.
Three thousand residents fled their camp fearing an attack by "Mai Mai" militia on Sunday to sleep on beds of leaves, only to return to find the government troops sent to their rescue had stolen bicycles, bed mats and much of their maize.
The incident, 10 km (six miles) outside the remote town of Mitwaba, highlights the plight of villagers in a region where former pro-government militiamen are fighting the army, but both sides frequently turn their guns on easier targets.
"A Mai Mai soldier came into the village last night at about eight. He fired a few shots and said he had come to take a wife," Cesar Kayumba, a health worker who lives with the displaced civilians, told Reuters in Mazombe camp on Monday.
"The whole camp fled and spent the night in the bushes. Most of them have come back now," he added as barefoot elderly men, women and children trickled back into the camp and returned to the straw huts that have been their homes for nine months.
Ranked as one of Africa's most neglected crises, the suffering caused by rampant violence in Democratic Republic of Congo is often associated with the eastern region closer to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, in the Kivu provinces and Ituri.
But in the vast, southeastern province of Katanga, bordering Zambia, a centre of copper and cobalt mining, civilians bereft of protection from U.N. peacekeepers are constantly faced with the risk of attack from men with guns -- soldiers or militiamen.
Based in Mitwaba, which lies 450 km north of the Katangan provincial capital, Lubumbashi, more than 100 government soldiers were dispatched on foot and by bicycle before dawn on Monday, ostensibly to fend off the gunmen.
"The Mai Mai had gone but they (the soldiers) stole maize, manioc, and a few bikes from the huts of the people who had fled," Kayumba said, adding that plastic sheeting and containers had also been stolen from a mud hut that serves as his clinic.
FORGOTTEN EMERGENCY
The camps are only the most visible manifestation of the suffering in Katanga. Medical organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres is looking after more than 15,000 civilians forced to flee into camps to throughout Mitwaba territory to avoid attack.
But residents say many others are hiding in the forests, fearing raids by the Mai Mai militia, who used to fight alongside government forces against Rwandan-backed rebels during a 1998-2003 war but who now kill and loot at will.
With nearly 17,000 soldiers, the U.N. mission in Congo is the world's largest, but just 100 troops are based in Katanga.
As a result, poorly equipped and seldom-paid government soldiers are charged with taking on the Mai Mai, traditional fighters who believe they are invincible once they have been blessed with water and special herbs.
A Reuters journalist saw dozens of soldiers returning from the camp on Monday with sleeping mats on their heads and bicycles laden with bags of maize distributed by aid workers.
"This is my maize -- I bought it off the refugees in the camp," said one government soldier returning to Mitwaba, who, like most others, had an old AK-47 rifle but wore no uniform.
Kalenge Kiandwa, the camp's tired-looking police commander, had a different version: "We saw the army going into houses saying they were looking for Mai Mai but coming out with the belongings of those that had fled."
"Their commanders told them not to steal anything but they did anyway. The four of us policemen didn't stop them because we were scared," he said.
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