/ 29 November 1996

In Zaire, refugees’ rubbish is prized

The refugees may be going, but the suffering continues. Chris McGreal reports from Mugunga

IT might be that in the distant future someone will stumble upon Mugunga and wonder if they aren’t standing in the midst of some lost civilisation.

Only a maze of walls laboriously cleaved from the harsh carpet of volcanic rock will remain. Goma’s desperate residents are seeing to that.

Where Rwandan Hutus clogged the roads as they shuffled home a few days ago, thousands upon thousands of Zaireans now swarm. They spill over the walls which marked out the tiny plots into which 300 000 refugees separated themselves in this refugee camp for two years.

Mugunga is one of a handful of dead cities scattered around Goma. A month ago they flourished with shops, schools, hospitals, churches and funeral parlours. Between them they were home to a million people, three times the population of Goma.

Overnight the refugees were ushered home after what amounted to a Rwandan invasion, and Mugunga was left a sprawling dustbin. For 13km, the camp is strewn with abandoned pots, clothing, furniture and plastic sheeting handed out by the United Nations. But Goma’s residents are after the precious wooden skeletons of former homes.

Since the rebels seized Goma there have been no deliveries of fuel and there is no electricity. Even water is scarce. Charcoal has quadrupled in price while work is more elusive than ever. The only petrol is sold in plastic bottles by the roadside at high markups. The remnants of life in Mugunga are keeping Goma’s stoves burning.

Tshikoza wa Tshikoza is a teacher who fled when rebels seized the town. “When the war came I left and people looted my house. My neighbours robbed us. There was nothing left. Now there’s no electricity in town. There’s no money to buy fuel. There are no jobs. We take the wood to cook on and we sell it to the rich to buy food,” he said.

Typically for central Africa, it is mostly women who make the long march to Mugunga and back in the heat or torrential rain. They carry their loads by slinging a rope across their foreheads and the wood on their backs, trekking the 16km back to Goma with their heads down and eyes boring into the road.

Boys speed past carrying their cargoes on rudimentary wooden scooters, known as “Flintstones’ bikes” by the foreigners who once lived in Goma. A privileged few arrive by car to cart off abandoned beds, clothes and even a potted petunia.

Anybody stumbling on Mugunga would wonder why it was chosen as a home for hundreds of thousands of people. It is a pitiless landscape of harsh volcanic rock which belies the beauty of the surrounding Virunga national park.

Yet for all their hardships, the dead cities were in many ways more privileged than most in Africa. Few people on the continent receive the kind of foreign-funded medical care reserved for the refugees in the cavernous tent hospitals. Infant mortality rates were well below those in most of Africa, including Rwanda before the war and genocide. The refugees enjoyed clean water and regular rations. Goma’s residents resented it.

As the Zaireans pick Mugunga clean, a flow of refugees continues to tramp out of the forests where they have been hiding for weeks. They appear oblivious to the destruction of their former homes. Some can barely walk on feet worn raw. A few hobble on despite bullet and machete wounds.

As the Rwandans reach the border, the Zaireans take one last opportunity to reap something from the people who lived on their doorstep for more than two years. The money- changers pounce to buy up Zairean currency at one third of its value before the refugees finally cross into their homeland.