At the Protestant church in Ntoroko, in Uganda’s western Bundibugyo district, Hallelulia, resplendent in his Sunday best, strikes up his bass guitar.
”The attempt to pacify Ituri was a failure and a waste of money”, he comments matter-of-factly before launching into a song to the glory of God.
Hallelulia, and the other 29 ethnic Hema who make up the Hosannah Choir last week fled the town of Kasenyi in the strife-torn Ituri district of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), piling their squeaky amplifier, their guitars and their families onto boats to seek refuge on the Ugandan side of the border.
”All the refugees in the region are Hema or allies of the Hema”, explains Alyegera Bimbona, a 27-year-old secondary school teacher from the Ituri village of Acholi, which lies on the other side of Lake Albert.
”The Lendu want to kill us — they say we occupied their land and they’re resentful because we’re richer.
”They’ve been raiding the area around my home for the past month now,” he said.
The Lendu are the majority tribe in the Ituri region — of which Bunia is the capital — and have long been engaged in a bitter land feud with the minority Hema, a feud that has been greatly exacerbated by the influx of weapons and emergence of numerous politico-military groups since the wider DRC war began in 1998.
More than 50 000 people have been killed and at least half-a-million displaced by the clashes in the last few years, according to several estimates.
And more are fleeing by the day. At Ntoroko landing stage, where the air is heavy with the smell of fish, three boats are arriving. One carries a Toyota pickup truck, the other groups of women and children, dazed by three hours on the water in the blinding sun.
Marie-Ange staggers ashore, her baby on her back and three small children carrying jerrycans and cooking pots in her wake.
”My husband stayed behind”, she said. ”To fight?”
”No”, she laughs, ”to watch our house”.
Over the past 12 years, looting has become almost an art form in DRC. All Congolese know that once they leave their personal belongings behind, they will be stolen.
Jeff is a Congolese immigration official, who is helping register the refugees. He reckons that there are 45 000 Congolese Hema refugees in the Bundibugyo region alone and that most have arrived since the Ugandan army started withdrawing from Ituri at the end of April.
The majority have been taken in by local families.
”The number of refugees here will soon outnumber the local population”, he said.
”There are still 10 000 people camping in Kasenyi waiting for boats to cross the lake,” he added.
A stone’s throw from the church are the barracks housing Ugandan soldiers who have pulled out of the DRC and the Congolese wives they brought back with them.
One of the women, Consolata, busies herself next to a pile of rocket-propelled grenades, putting together a meal of beans supplemented with her husband’s corned beef rations.
Back at the Protestant church women refugees are having their hair plaited.
”Life goes on”, shrugs one of the women. – Sapa-AFP