The DRC's living dead
2003-05-19 12:00
Bunia - No one knew the name of the latest young man brought in to the health centre.
He was lying naked and apparently lifeless, a machete gash across the right side of his face. Maggots were crawling out of his eyes, out of his mouth and over his body while his wounds gave off the sickly sweet smell of decay.
"When they brought him in I thought he was dead", said Faustin M'Pabenda, the laboratory worker who set up this health centre.
Yet when a nurse pinches the young man's shoulder, his limbs jerk. He is still alive.
He also has a wound to the head. The nurses suspect a cranial fracture, in which case, they say, he will die.
UN peace-keeping troops brought the patient in to the centre on Sunday morning from Nyakasunza parish where about 20 people were massacred a week ago.
Half of the centre's 70 patients were wounded in the fighting of the past few days. Some were hit by bullets; others have multiple knife or machete wounds.
"A tragedy has struck us", sighs M'Pabenda, who tells how he founded the centre with his own stock of drugs and ran it alone for four days before receiving help from four NGOs and the UN Mission to DR Congo (Monuc).
For some of the patients here, it would have been better if they had died from their wounds.
Twenty-four-year-old Nahema had just given birth to a little girl when a shell struck the maternity hospital, smashing her head open. Now she lies in the health centre, minus part of her brain, with no control over her limbs, groaning softly from time to time.
Her new-born baby, Monika, wearing a yellow bonnet, is lying on a cushion in a room in the Monuc compound, her tiny face serene. A distant relative is looking after her, but since she has no more milk and no money to buy powdered milk, she wants to put the baby in an orphanage as soon as possible.
"I already have a baby", she says, pointing to a four-month-old boy, "and I work. What do you expect me to do?"
"People don't have the means to feed another mouth", explains M'Pabenda. "Before they could have taken a child in, but now that everything has been looted and there's no more work, they can't manage to do it any more".
Another infant, who with her first two milk teeth must be about six months old, has arm and leg wounds. She was rescued from beneath a pile of corpses. Emmanuelle, the mother of a little girl of eight, is taking care of her and rocking her on her lap.
Even the old have suffered the most brutal attacks.
"Look at this old grandma - she was ready to die of old age but that didn't stop them from hacking her arm off", a nurse mutters bitterly.
The stick-thin old woman, so old as to be ageless, has had her arm severed by militia. Her last drop of energy goes into sucking up soup from a pan lid that she holds with her one remaining hand.
Two warring factions in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) agreed on Sunday to cohabit in the town of Bunia, riven by weeks of ethnic clashes, UN sources said.
A long-running feud between the majority Lendu and minority Hema groups has become even more deadly since the onset of DRC's wider war in 1998 led to an influx of weapons and numerous politico-military groups eager to recruit fighters and more than willing to exploit deep-seated animosities.
DRC's war officially ended early last month, when rebel groups, the government, civil society and the political opposition signed the final act of a peace agreement that provided for the creation of a transitional government.