Vindza and Kimba, two cities in the heart of Congo’s Pool region, have become virtual ghost towns in recent months, as residents flee to the forest to escape fighting between government troops and rebels.
Vindza resident Nestor Massamba is one of many who have fled the Pool region since March 29, when government forces launched a major offensive to wipe out renegade Ninja militiamen who have refused to follow a disarmament program set up in a 1999 peace pact.
”We still don’t know which side is responsible for the war,” Massamba said. He arrived in Brazzaville, the capital of this central African country, on Wednesday after trekking over 150 kilometres for four days.
”For nearly two months, the thousands of civilians that live there have only been eating what they can gather, cassava root and wild fruits,” he said.
”We have a lot of cases of sickness — lung infections, malaria, diarrhoea, malnutrition, and skin disease — among the children, older people, and pregnant women,” Massamba said.
”There have already been several deaths, especially among the children and older people,” he said. ”This war really has to stop if we want to save the civilians who are still trapped in that forest.”
Under a peace pact signed late in 1999 after a decade of successive conflicts, most of the militia forces that served as private armies for different political forces laid down their arms, but the Ninjas, led by Pastor Frederik Bitsangou, alias Ntumi, refused.
The United Nations has said that more than 40 000 people have fled their homes since the two-month-old conflict broke out and has warned of a humanitarian disaster, as aid programs cannot reach the displaced to provide them with food or medicine.
Aid organisations are loathe to repeat the experiences of the 1998-99 civil war that ravaged the country, when workers were unable to reach the civilian population until eight or nine months after fighting began.
”It’s not easy to leave the forest to come to Brazzaville or neighbouring regions,” said Eric Malonga, who fled a forest near Kimba.
”Armed Ninjas are in the forest among the civilians and keep them from leaving under threat of death,” he said. ”To get to Brazzaville, we only walked at night to avoid being caught.” – Sapa-AFP