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Seizing This Moment of Hope: Ituri

Seizing This Moment of Hope

The greed, exploitation, and abuse that have infested the DRC since the days of Leopold II have reached their nadir in the northeastern district of Ituri. The district seems oddly disconnected from the rest of the country, a microcosm of its ills, a humanitarian catastrophe within a humanitarian catastrophe. In 1999, Ugandan military commanders stoked a local conflict over land between majority Lendu farmers and minority Hema cattle owners into a major conflagration in order to take control of the vast Kilo Moto gold fi elds. Tens of thousands of people have died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Despite the departure in 2003 of the last Ugandan troops—and the successful national elections in July 2006—war and displacement continue.

For months, MONUC and the FARDC have battled a new coalition of rebels to the south of Bunia, the district’s capital. Three times, the FARDC has taken the rebel’s stronghold at Tché, and three times the rebels have taken it back (the last in July 2006, during RI’s visit to the region). Arms are easy to procure: the fi ghting is taking place near the shores of Lake Albert, which forms a porous border with Uganda, with natural resources crossing to pay for weapons that come back. The UN imposed an arms embargo on the DRC in 2003 but has never been able to enforce it.

For now, 150,000 people have been pushed out of their homes by the fighting. The RI team met some who had walked north to Bunia, finding refuge in a large high school. Silently, the women showed us the classrooms where they had been sleeping for the previous day or so, benches pushed to the side, mats and pots and jerry cans spread out to mark each family’s spot. The district authorities, however, refused to let them stay, mindful of the sprawling camp that sprang up next to the Bunia airport following ethnic massacres in 2003. The men were thus in a field a few miles south of town, struggling to construct shelters of reeds and straw, wondering for how long they might need them.

Many more, up to 45,000, were wedged into the small village of Gety, southwest of Bunia. The new Rapid Response Mechanism, so successful in other parts of eastern DRC, was struggling to assist them as well as thousands more in other sites. By mid-August 2006, food supplies were particularly low, and the UN estimated that 10 people, mostly children, were dying each day. To the north of Bunia, peace had returned and the displaced had returned home; in the rest of the country, people were waiting breathlessly for the results of the recent elections. In Gety, though, the focus was on survival, a scenario that will be repeated again and again as peace takes its time to take hold.

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