On the wooded heights north of Kanyabayonga, a fetid stench rises from the corpses that have lain three days in the African sun.
The traces of fighting between mutinous soldiers and the army in this eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are everywhere to be seen, and in the centre of the town what little was left has been pillaged.
In a trench dug in haste, half a dozen bodies lie under a thick cloud of flies as battalions of black ants swarm around the bullet wounds.
On the floor lie chicken legs that the men were about to eat when they were killed, a Bible with torn pages, unexploded munitions and eucalyptus branches ripped off by the explosions of shells.
One of the bodies wears the uniform of the DRC’s regular army. The khaki fatigues of the others bear no distinctive signs.
None of the dead have boots. The mutineers, who claim to have received no uniforms or boots from the army command since the beginning of a peace process in June 2003, systematically supply themselves with the shoes and sometimes the trousers of the dead.
Major fighting in Kanyabayonga appears to have ceased, but the sound of heavy machine-gun fire still echoes around the nearby hillsides.
The origins and cause of the mutiny are murky, but there is strong suspicion that it has been supported by Rwanda.
Rwanda may even have sent troops into the DRC to eliminate the destabilising remnants of Hutu troops and militias responsible for the 1994 genocide.
In the centre of Kanyabayonga, emptied of almost its entire population, the looting has come to an end because there is nothing much left to take.
The looters used grenades to blast open store-fronts to get at the goods inside. Mutinous soldiers go around stealing in groups, civilians do it as families, and no one bothers to hide what he or she is doing.
A mother with an infant on her back finds a hole in a store wall too tight to pass, and so sends in her two eldest children to fetch what they can.
The forward positions of the regular army troops can be found a dozen kilometres to the north, just before the town of Kayina.
The soldiers say they have been in a tactical retreat since Thursday. A green-painted truck carries troops up to the front.
”Since the first day of our tactical retreat, the population has started coming back, although they have not had the time to settle in,” said Major Alain Kiewa, a regular army commander at Kayina.
The officers are polite. They speak, apparently without rancor, of ”our brothers on the other side”, and remember that the mutinous troops are, or were, members of the same army.
In Rwindi, a village 25km south of Kanyabayonga, people told how the have been scared by the sound of bombs in recent days, but also complain about their difficulty in getting supplies.
Barabara Sikilini, a pastor dressed in shorts and T-shirt, explained that the inhabitants of Rwindi usually go to Kanyabayonga to buy their food.
”With the fighting and the looting, there is hunger here,” he said. — Sapa-AFP