Dead bodies litter Bunia’s empty streets. From some the blood still drips from machete slashes, spear thrusts and bullet wounds. Others are two weeks old and stinking, half-eaten by the packs of dogs flopping lazily about the once-prosperous north-eastern capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There are women’s bodies scattered in Bunia’s main mar ket place; a baby’s body on its main road; two priests’ bodies inside one church. Last week, a burning corpse was tossed on to the main UN compound’s lawn, to show 700 Uruguayan peacekeepers what they were missing while they cowered under fire behind its razor-wire perimeter, unauthorised to intervene in the latest massacre of Congolese civilians.
As the two-week fight for Bunia between rival ethnic militias cooled this week, Albert Asumani slipped back to the ransacked suburb of Nyambe where he lives.
”Why? Why are we killing our brothers? When will it end?” he said, stripping off a pair of yellow rubber gloves he had donned to toss two dead neighbours into a pit-latrine.
This week, for perhaps the first time, western countries appear to be asking the same question about DRC’s four-and-a-half-year war, which at one time involved nine national armies and a confusion of local militias, and which has already claimed an estimated 4,7-million lives.
On Tuesday France sent military observers to Bunia; it is now considering sending troops with orders to shoot to kill. Britain may send a small force in support. This flicker of attention to the world’s biggest war comes after the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, called for a ”coalition of the willing” to police Bunia and the surrounding hills of Ituri province.
Carla del Ponte, the UN war crimes prosecutor, has suggested that the mass killings by the local Hema and Lendu tribes ”could be genocide”.
In fact, the war in Ituri is not a genocide, a word which describes a systematic programme of annihilation. It is too chaotic, with random atrocities perpetrated by Hema and Lendu militias. Nor is the killing of 300 people in Bunia particularly extreme by Ituri’s recent standards.
Last September in nearby Nyakunde village, 1 200 Hema civilians were killed. In all, Ituri’s war — which began after Uganda armed Hemas and Lendus in a bid to control Ituri — has claimed an estimated 50 000 lives.
”No one was bothered about Nyakunde or took much notice of Ituri before,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch. ”But now you have a few UN peacekeepers getting shot at and suddenly everyone’s interested in Congo.”
The battle for Bunia began on March 6, as Ugandan troops withdrew from the town in line with a recent peace accord.
With the UN mission in DRC unable to fill the vacuum — having only 4 000 troops to police an area two-thirds the size of western Europe — a massacre in Bunia had been widely predicted.
”Does the world care what happens to Congo? No,” said Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Vollot, the French commander of UN forces in Ituri.
”We’ve been sending messages every day to [the UN headquarters in] New York [saying] this was going to happen, that we need more troops. Nothing was done.”
The Lendus took the town, and began looting and killing Hema civilians, putting 250 000 people to flight.
Among the 12 000 that remained, crammed against the razor-wire of the UN compound, was Safi Sabina, 32. ”People were screaming, we were running from the machetes,” she said, bowing her head to the baby in her lap as she began to cry. Her father, mother, two aunts and three young brothers and sisters were all murdered by the militiamen.
Days later, the main Hema militia, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), rearmed by Uganda, took the town. During the UPC’s previous seven-month rule in Ituri, its fighters massacred an estimated 10 000 Lendus. Now, in power again, it is killing less selectively.
In Nyambe, a dozen bodies lay in front of smashed-up mud huts, with half a dozen more patches of blood to show where bodies Asumani had already buried had lain.
The UPC chased the Lendus through the suburb, and then returned to murder its residents and loot their homes, he said. Most of their victims were not even Lendu, but members of Ituri’s other small tribes, murdered for their few cooking pots and clothes.
This week, the UPC’s many child fighters were looting the last of Bunia. Tripping over stolen jackets many sizes too big, they did not spare the rotting corpses a glance. One showed off a chain of watches up to his elbow — none had batteries — and complained of having no food.
Emerging from a scrimmage of fighters inside a clothes warehouse, Singoma Mapasa (14) shed light on a cycle of violence fuelling a dozen or more small wars in eastern DRC, a land crammed with the guns of invading foreign armies.
Asked why he was fighting, Singoma said nothing about tribal hate. ”The Lendus murdered my parents,” he said. ”So, now, how else could I survive?”
With Bunia thoroughly looted this week, the contents of its every house spilled into the dirt outside, Lendu and Hema fighters mixed cheerfully across the frontline.
”We don’t have a problem anymore, we’re Congolese brothers,” declared one such group within metres of Nyambe’s decaying bodies. The killing and looting, they explained, was the ”inevitable” consequence of war. At least it was over, they said.
In the green hills outside Bunia, however, the killing continued.
”Bunia’s calm again, but in the bush we hear of the same atrocities that have been going on for three years,” said Michel Kassa, the head of the UN coordination agency, OCHA, after overflying Ituri’s razed villages.
”We know there are people there in terrible need, but we won’t be able to reach them unless an international force comes to put an end to this orgy of violence.”
And in Bunia’s main hospital, another reminder that violence in Ituri is long-running and, unless there is an intervention, likely to be on-going.
In February, two landmines victims, Isabelle, a Hema, and Benita, a Lendu, spoke to the Guardian, lying side-by-side in a crowded ward. This week, they were virtually the only patients remaining; most of the rest fled when the hospital was looted by the UPC.
”Yes, we stayed here,” said Isabelle, a 47-year-old mother of seven children. ”How could I run on one leg?” – Guardian Unlimited Â