Rebuilding Lives amid a Fragile Peace in Eastern Congo
Monday, November 13, 2006
Rick sends in the latest from Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo:
Andrea, John, and I are sitting at the Bukavu airport, waiting for a bus to take us into the city. The trip takes more than an hour, and seems interminable because of the glacial pace of the bus and the terrible state of the road. But we're in a good mood because we've had a good visit to South Kivu, and there are just a few days left before we wrap up the mission.
We made it out of Lodja last week with no problem, despite the rain that had been falling all day and threatened to soften up the runway too much to be safe. We had a brief layover in Kinshasa, then headed east. Kinshasa to Kisangani, Kisangani to Kindu, Kindu to Bukavu: it was an all-day affair. After another brief night at a hotel in town, we took a UN helicopter south to Uvira, the staging point for operations to help the thousands of Congolese refugees returning from Tanzania.
The problem is that tension around the elections has slowed returning refugees to a trickle: of the 35,000 returnees expected in 2006, only 14,000 have come back so far. To get down even further south along Lake Tanganyika, into the home villages of the refugees, we turned to the Norwegian Refugee Council, an NGO with a lot of experience helping refugees and IDPs. Our hosts were Brad and Hanne, and staying at their place in Uvira felt like a vacation after our foray out to the wilds of Kasai Oriental province last week.
Last Friday, then, we organized a convoy of NRC vehicles to take us down the road to Baraka. The first obstacle was a road wash-out, about thirty minutes south of town. With the heavy rains in the region, a river had leapt its banks, carrying away a newly built bridge and flooding our road. A NRC car came up from Baraka to meet us, and we carried our gear across a narrow footbridge and down along the raging water, all captured on film by our intrepid cameraman, John.
Saturday morning, we pushed down to Fizi, a small village largely emptied out during the war. Andrea and I had visited the area in March, and were glad to see that conditions have improved, although people are still having trouble paying school fees to make sure their kids can continue the education they started at the refugee camps in Tanzania. We also visited the village of Kikonde, where hundreds of tin roofs glint in the sun, testament to NRC's efforts to help the most needy families -- with no distinction between returning refugees, returning internally displaced, or those who stayed -- build decent homes.
Although life is returning to the area, and peace has taken hold, this region along the shores of Lake Tanganyika has been a theater of war for 40 years. Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the father of the current president and who toppled Mobutu in 1997, began his rebellion here, conscripting members of the dominant Bembe tribe and inviting harsh reprisals from Kinshasa. After the start of the 1998 war, when Rwanda invaded the east of Congo against its former protégé Kabila, Burundian rebels took advantage of the chaos to occupy the area around Baraka and Fizi. The people we spoke with told us horrendous stories of rape and abuse; one woman called out to a girl of 9 to join us, then recounted how she had been sexually assaulted four years ago, when she was just 5 years old.
Throughout, John filmed what he could, capturing stories on tape. We had been obliged to get special authorizations for him in Kinshasa to film here, which served us well last week in Kasai. This week, however, the authorities were less welcoming. He had a run-in with the military on Friday morning in Uvira, and then got picked up by the intelligence service in Baraka on Saturday morning while he was out filming. That cost us a $25 fine - and we had to pay another $20 yesterday to register our presence officially. Even today, while we were getting ready to leave Uvira, the immigration authorities hassled Brad for hours, saying that he was harboring spies who were going around filming clandestinely.
So, no arrests, and we have survived bad roads and long days to get here to Bukavu. Tomorrow we hope to get out to see some people who have been displaced by the ongoing fighting and abuse taking place in the hills nearby, and then Wednesday we're off to Kinshasa for our last meetings before leaving on Thursday.
Andrea, John, and I are sitting at the Bukavu airport, waiting for a bus to take us into the city. The trip takes more than an hour, and seems interminable because of the glacial pace of the bus and the terrible state of the road. But we're in a good mood because we've had a good visit to South Kivu, and there are just a few days left before we wrap up the mission.
We made it out of Lodja last week with no problem, despite the rain that had been falling all day and threatened to soften up the runway too much to be safe. We had a brief layover in Kinshasa, then headed east. Kinshasa to Kisangani, Kisangani to Kindu, Kindu to Bukavu: it was an all-day affair. After another brief night at a hotel in town, we took a UN helicopter south to Uvira, the staging point for operations to help the thousands of Congolese refugees returning from Tanzania.
The problem is that tension around the elections has slowed returning refugees to a trickle: of the 35,000 returnees expected in 2006, only 14,000 have come back so far. To get down even further south along Lake Tanganyika, into the home villages of the refugees, we turned to the Norwegian Refugee Council, an NGO with a lot of experience helping refugees and IDPs. Our hosts were Brad and Hanne, and staying at their place in Uvira felt like a vacation after our foray out to the wilds of Kasai Oriental province last week.
Last Friday, then, we organized a convoy of NRC vehicles to take us down the road to Baraka. The first obstacle was a road wash-out, about thirty minutes south of town. With the heavy rains in the region, a river had leapt its banks, carrying away a newly built bridge and flooding our road. A NRC car came up from Baraka to meet us, and we carried our gear across a narrow footbridge and down along the raging water, all captured on film by our intrepid cameraman, John.
Saturday morning, we pushed down to Fizi, a small village largely emptied out during the war. Andrea and I had visited the area in March, and were glad to see that conditions have improved, although people are still having trouble paying school fees to make sure their kids can continue the education they started at the refugee camps in Tanzania. We also visited the village of Kikonde, where hundreds of tin roofs glint in the sun, testament to NRC's efforts to help the most needy families -- with no distinction between returning refugees, returning internally displaced, or those who stayed -- build decent homes.
Although life is returning to the area, and peace has taken hold, this region along the shores of Lake Tanganyika has been a theater of war for 40 years. Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the father of the current president and who toppled Mobutu in 1997, began his rebellion here, conscripting members of the dominant Bembe tribe and inviting harsh reprisals from Kinshasa. After the start of the 1998 war, when Rwanda invaded the east of Congo against its former protégé Kabila, Burundian rebels took advantage of the chaos to occupy the area around Baraka and Fizi. The people we spoke with told us horrendous stories of rape and abuse; one woman called out to a girl of 9 to join us, then recounted how she had been sexually assaulted four years ago, when she was just 5 years old.
Throughout, John filmed what he could, capturing stories on tape. We had been obliged to get special authorizations for him in Kinshasa to film here, which served us well last week in Kasai. This week, however, the authorities were less welcoming. He had a run-in with the military on Friday morning in Uvira, and then got picked up by the intelligence service in Baraka on Saturday morning while he was out filming. That cost us a $25 fine - and we had to pay another $20 yesterday to register our presence officially. Even today, while we were getting ready to leave Uvira, the immigration authorities hassled Brad for hours, saying that he was harboring spies who were going around filming clandestinely.
So, no arrests, and we have survived bad roads and long days to get here to Bukavu. Tomorrow we hope to get out to see some people who have been displaced by the ongoing fighting and abuse taking place in the hills nearby, and then Wednesday we're off to Kinshasa for our last meetings before leaving on Thursday.
Labels: Democratic Republic of Congo
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