The next morning, as the village of Blukwa began burying its 416 dead, Dheza found her husband and two surviving sons alive. That was Jan. 11. But it wasn’t until early this month that they got her to a hospital in the market town of Drondo, eight miles away by jeep on bad roads. Gangrene had set in. Dr. Tsulo Ngandju, the hospital director, soon amputated one arm at the shoulder. “Oh, and she was four months pregnant,” added the doctor last week as he finished interpreting the woman’s story and moved on to the next bed. She lost the baby.
Can the United Nations pull Congo out of its deadly spiral? Last week Washington formally backed a plan by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send in a 5,500-member peacekeeping force. “It is self-evident that if the U.N. does not do what it can to assist those who want peace in Congo, the result will be a certain humanitarian and security disaster,” said Richard Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the United Nations. But the U.S. resolution now before the Security Council stipulates that no peacekeepers should be deployed until the fighting stops. And fighting has been nearly constant since 1996, when rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda began the overthrow of the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. A peace agreement signed last July by three rebel factions and six governments has been violated repeatedly; last week alone, fighting flared on four separate fronts.
Few outsiders witness the death throes of the nation. But it is clear that instability has bred violence reminiscent of the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Drza Dheza, 22, fell victim to a little-noticed struggle that has played out since last June between her minority tribe, the landowning Hema, and the Lendu, peasant farmers who are in the majority in the region. As many as 7,000 people have died in the single greatest tragedy in the tribes’ 500 years of common history, according to relief workers and local doctors in the remote region, 200 miles north of the best-known rebel stronghold, Goma. Entire villages lie in ruins, marked only by mass graves in the scorched earth.
Each side accuses the other of atrocities. The Hema say the Lendu take drugs and cut up their victims for rituals. The Lendu accuse the Hema of cutting the bodies of the dead in half. Both claim to be victims of attacks by soldiers of the regular Ugandan Army, which occupied the region 18 months ago–and which exercises nominal control over two rebel factions in the region.
Officially, neighboring Uganda denies any involvement in the horror. Privately, Ugandan Army officers in Bunia, the capital of the troubled Ituri district, admit they are involved. “People will say that the UPDF [Ugandan People Defense Forces] killed them, and they are right,” says one sergeant. A local rebel leader, Jacques Depelchin, charges that rich Hema ranchers paid off Ugandan officers to devastate Lendu villages and empty the land for more grazing. The relief group Medecins Sans Frontieres, which pulled out of the area last week after staff members were attacked by Lendu extremists, reported that all the gunshot victims its members examined–apparent victims of soldiers, not peasants–were Lendu.
The horror stories on both sides sound the same. “They came with machetes and started attacking us,” said Nzale Ngabusi, 22, a Hema who was recovering in the Drondro hospital last week from three deep cuts across his face. “They were drugged. My father and grandfather were killed.” Batis Chulo, 25, a Lendu farmer, said he lost a year-old and his grandfather Jan. 10 in a Hema attack on the town of Saliboko. His house was burned to the ground. “We were attacked by many people, maybe three thousand of them,” he said. “Many of us left, and many are still in the bush.”
So far, all efforts to stop the cycle of reprisals have failed. “This kind of war has a poison of its own,” says Depelchin, who set up a commission to try to end the killing. Many corrupt Ugandan Army officers were replaced in December when a new battalion moved in, he said.
But the new occupiers could prove little more dependable than the old. Business people in the area say that the second group of Ugandan soldiers already appears to have begun taking bribes from the locals. At root, the problem is that war has stripped away old structures for dealing with longstanding class conflicts. The government military put down a clash between the two groups 15 years ago, and local courts or police settled subsequent disagreements by arbitration. But it is one thing to recognize this evil chemistry, quite another to neutralize it. The hospital in Drondo will have no problem filling its beds.
