DRC survivors tell gory tales

2005-02-28 15:22

Bunia - In this makeshift hospital in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the survivors tell horrific tales of seemingly random but shockingly brutal militia attacks.

Seven-year-old Rema Kakweyer is one. As she lies on a cot, nursing machete wounds to her left shoulder and wrist, her father, Lotsima, haltingly recalls the events that brought him and his daughter here.

"It was night," he said, his lips and grey beard moving slowly, his eyes vacant. "We were walking. We met some armed men and the children were slashed by machetes."

"This is the first time we have seen such a thing," Lotsima said, pondering, while his daughter hopes out loud that her life will soon return to normal. "If my wound heals fast, I will go back to school," she said softly.

They are just two of scores of innocents caught up in a surge of bloody violence that has hit the DRC's Ituri region in recent weeks but was largely unnoticed until a militia ambush on Friday killed nine UN peacekeepers.

Just a day earlier, in the same Tche-Kafe-Kakwa area north of Bunia town where the Bangladeshi UN troops were killed, militants attacked the group that included Rema and Lotsima.

Around them in this Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital lie other victims: children and adults who are among the 70 000 people to have fled or been forced to leave their homes since the end of last year as the militias have gone on a spree of looting, rape and murder against civilians.

Seven-year-old Luji Mpengo has machete wounds to the neck and shoulder.

Seven-year-old Innocent Jijanga has similar wounds to the neck and face.

A 42-year-old man named Marco with one arm in a cast and bullet wound in the chest wonders whether his two teenage children who were wounded in a militant attack in Kakwa are still missing or even alive.

He fears for his 12-year-old daughter Ditsove who was bludgeoned by militants and is barely able to recognise people.

Marco has little recollection of the attack.

"When I woke up, some were dead and others had disappeared," he said, speaking with difficulty in a dull monotone voice.

Jeanne, a 40-year-old woman recovering from a bullet wound to the leg, has a similar story. She said she and a group of friends were set upon by men armed with guns and machetes one Wednesday about a month ago.

"Many people died," she said. "They left me for dead. When I regained consciousness, I was the only survivor."

None of the victims can say with certainty the real reason for the violence. The attackers don't steal or demand anything, so the survivors assume the motivation is racial.

"In this region, we do not talk of fighting between two groups, but killings committed on the civilian population by all groups," said one aid worker in Ituri.

Fred Meylan, who has been a doctor at MSF's Bon Marche hospital in Bunia for two years, said the patients he is treating now remind him of those he saw in 2003 during the last explosion of violence.

- AFP