DRC ghost town protects itself

2009-07-08 20:17

Mbingi - In the daytime, Mbingi is a pretty hillside village in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). But by night it is a phantom village, whose residents have fled to sleep in the forest.

Local people fear the armed men roving the region, whether they are rebels, government troops or tribal militias. They do not want to be looted again and worse.

Even before nightfall, a young woman, Leussa, her husband, her grandparents and numerous children, the youngest of them just four, are gathered at the lower end of the village in Nord-Kivu province.

An eerie, heavy feeling

"We're going down the valley and we're going to sleep in the forest. It takes half an hour to get there," Leussa, 22, said, wrapped in a long strip of fabric. "Everybody does this."

In the village itself, there are soon no sounds and no light and all the doors are closed. To walk through it when the people have gone gives you an eerie, heavy feeling.

But on July 2, Mbingi was raided by dozens of Mai Mai militiamen and Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). They looted all the shops on the main street and several houses.

That day, soldiers of the Congolese army posted on top of a small nearby hill were too few to intervene. The rest of their unit was in action against the Rwandan rebels and their militia allies several kilometres distant.

Since that attack, Mbingi's residents have fled every night and only return from the forest in the small hours of the morning. The village had already been looted in the early hours of May 11, when the government troops fled.

'We're afraid of everyone'

"We're afraid of everyone, militias, rebels and soldiers," Luessa explained before vanishing into the forest with her family of about a dozen.

Some residents wanted to stay at home, but since Monday more soldiers have arrived at the hillside post, preparing for an operation against rebel bases in villages of the region. And the population is scared.

"We don't know what to do. Since there's nothing left to loot, they'll set fire to the village when they come back," said Charles Waly, the head of the local Roman Catholic school.

Patrols of the UN mission in DRC, known by its French acronym Monuc, rarely come by Mbingi. The village is too far from the main roads and too close to the rebel positions that form little strongholds in the dense forest.

The nearest UN base, at Kirumba, is more than two hours' drive away along a narrow track, when the path is dry and practicable.

"The last time Monuc came was three weeks ago. They were only observers, not troops," Waly said.

He and three priests are the only ones left to sleep in the village, inside their parish, but they too are afraid and feel abandoned when the residents vanish at night.

When AFP journalists knocked on their door in the evening, they took several long minutes before they opened it. "If you had been soldiers or other men in arms, we wouldn't have opened up," Waly said.

- AFP