The war the world forgot

The week I spent as Unicef's guest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was one of the most shocking of my life.

April 24, 2006 11:06 AM | Printable version

The Great War of Africa has been fought for eight years in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Peace and power-sharing deals have come and gone. Elections are promised for July, the first free elections in the country's history. A UN peacekeeping force, Monuc, is in place, with 17,000 blue helmets trying to dominate a country the size of western Europe.

But the fighting continues, between the Congolese army and shifting alliances of rebel militias under the umbrella of the MRC, the Revolutionary Movement of the Congo. The death toll since 1998 has passed 4 million, the highest of any conflict since the second world war. The most volatile province is North Kivu, up against the borders with Uganda and Rwanda.

In my role as a Unicef ambassador I have just returned from a visit to North Kivu at the head of a small delegation. We travelled mostly by air because of the insecurity on the ground. New waves of refugees are on the move, driven out by government offensives against the rebels. Near Beni, in the north of the province, the militias fled to the forest and in turn displaced the native people, the pygmies. It is the first time in recorded history that the pygmies have left the forest. They had little choice. Their weapons, bows and poisoned-tipped arrows, are no match for Kalashnikovs.

The pygmy chief said: "This is a serious war and many of our relatives have been killed in the fighting. Our message to the world is that we cannot remain living like this."

This conflict in the heart of Africa shows modern warfare at its most brutal and primitive. It is the only war I have ever known where the worse things get, the more they are ignored.

Of all the war zones of the world, the DRC has the greatest concentration of child soldiers. Many thousands are thought to be still under arms. At Goma, the provincial capital, we visited a Unicef transit centre for some who have been successfully demobilised. A 17-year-old boy told me of his experiences: "I was eleven and a half years old when I became a soldier, and fought for six years. In our battalion, 17 soldiers were killed in the front line." I asked if he had ever killed anyone. "Yes," he replied, "I killed many people."

Just as shocking was a visit to a church hospital in Goma, where victims of rape take a two-month course of physical and psychological healing. This too is funded by Unicef. In the Congo's three armed conflicts since 1990, rape has been consistently used as a weapon of war. In the past three years, 4,500 of its victims have passed through the hospital - and that's frrom just one area of one province. Part of the horror of the rape epidemic is the sheer scale of it.

The approach of elections should be a force for stability, but it isn't. People can vote only where they are registered, near their homes. If they are driven from their homes they are disenfranchised. So militias and warlords with political ambitions can seriously affect the outcome. It is another of the Congo's innovations: a form of gerrymandering by armed force.

And as if that weren't enough, Goma is threatened by a volcano, the same volcano, Nyriagongo, that erupted four years ago, displacing 120,000 people. The difference between then and now is that the city has more than doubled in size, to 560,000. The new arrivals have nowehere to live except in the path of the lava. Goma's resident vulcanologist, Dr Jacques Durieux, predicts eruptions at up to eight points along the fissure between the volcano and the city. "It isn't a question of whether," he says, "but only a question of when."

The week I spent as Unicef's guest in the DRC was one of the most shocking of my life. Then I returned to find my own country in uproar about the price of petrol and the salaries of radio disc jockeys. And I wondered ... do we and the Congo really share the same planet?

• A report on the Great War of Africa is scheduled to be shown on BBC2's Newsnight at 10.30pm on Monday April 24.