It was in late March that I started receiving increasingly worrying reports about alleged atrocities in remote areas of North Kivu province. Military operations by the Congolese army against a rebel group known as FDLR—Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda—had continued (Rwandan troops deployed in a joint operation with the Congolese army withdrew in February); and reports suggested that the offensive was likely to expand to South Kivu.
I heard about reprisal attacks, the burning of houses, sexual violence, looting, and people being prevented from accessing their fields—their only source of food. Many of these reports were coming from areas where Oxfam teams had begun carrying out life-saving work with a local partner, helping to provide safe drinking water, clean latrines, and public health education.
I could not believe what I was reading: Up to 250,000 people reported to have left their homes since January.
Some of our senior staff, as skeptical as me, went to the field and came back with a clear report: It is true, they told me; it's just not on TV yet. Our immediate response was to scale up our emergency operations in South Lubero, which is in North Kivu. Water trucks were sent to provide clean water to displaced placed and the families who hosted them. Hygiene items were distributed, and health promoters were deployed to help prevent the outbreak of epidemics.
We also decided to open an emergency response office in the neighboring province of South Kivu where we were getting reports of another military build-up, indicating that a similar tragedy could happen there.
A few days later, I was on a plane crossing this vast country towards the conflict zone to support our field staff and to get a first-hand view of what was happening. After two flights and a trip by road I finally arrived in Lubero. The government representative there told me people needed urgent help.
I continued by road southwards into what the United Nations called the "red zone"—an area where military escorts are recommended. Oxfam refuses such escorts, due to concerns that we may be perceived as supporting a particular side in any conflict. It was one day after an attack on the town of Luofu, where 255 houses were burned to the ground.
We met some displaced people on the road, who were fleeing the fighting, carrying the few possessions they could take with them. They were exhausted and desperate. They were heading to a town called Kirumba, which was also our destination. Several thousand people had gathered there for an Oxfam emergency distribution of essential hygiene items.
Through an interpreter, I heard some of their stories. One woman witnessed another being gang-raped by three armed men. The victim died later, the witness told me. The witness—an old woman—ran away from her village with her children, but had become separated from her husband, who fled in another direction. She told me the few items she had managed to carry with her were taken away by soldiers.
As the Oxfam distribution of hygiene items continued, we travelled further south to a town called Kanyabayonga, where Oxfam was distributing water. The town's population has more than doubled during the recent fighting, and Oxfam is trucking in 180,000 liters of clean water every day.
Village chiefs gathered to tell me their stories. Since the start of the military operations, civilians are seen with suspicion by both warring sides, and accused of being collaborators. People have had no choice but to leave their villages—but they also have had nowhere safe to go.
They arrived in Kanyabayonga, they said, terrified, tired, and in need of protection and help. The fighting had not stopped. One day before we arrived, the FDLR rebels had attacked Kanyabayonga itself.
People were living with host families—in some cases, up to five other families in a house. I tried to imagine how it would be—no clean water, only basic squat latrines, with little money and a war going on around me.
But what really broke my heart was to hear about the systematic burning of houses in these remote areas of North Kivu province. Villagers reported that many thousands of homes had been burned to the ground.
There are about 17,500 UN peacekeepers stationed in Congo—but with little visible presence here to give these vulnerable people any sense of safety. People I spoke to wanted to see UN peacekeepers patrol on foot, to be present in their communities. To protect them.
Now I'm back in the eastern provincial capital, Goma, where Oxfam coordinates its emergency operations in Congo. I am happy that we have managed to scale up our emergency work in South Lubero. More help will come, if the security situation permits. If only the world would not look away.
]]>Marcel Stoessel, Head of Oxfam in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who just came back from the conflict zone, said: "There is nowhere that is safe in the area I visited. Villagers are being forced to flee, some for the fifth or sixth time, losing family members on the way. Women are being raped and abused. People have been looted of the few possessions they owned, and have had their houses burned to the ground—all of this is happening as we speak, but the world is looking away.
"The stories I heard are heartbreaking. A woman told me how she witnessed a brutal gang rape of a neighbor by three armed men. She thinks the victim must have died afterwards. She ran away with her children, but her husband ran in another direction. She does not know where he is."
At least 250,000 people have been forced to leave their homes since January. Oxfam is alarmed about the lack of protection of civilians in their home villages, but also about their safety in the towns they fled to, where armed men are also carrying out serious abuses.
There are not enough UN peacekeepers patrolling the areas affected by the new violence, leaving civilians feeling scared and vulnerable. While there are around 17,500 MONUC peacekeepers in the country, the force has very little visible presence in the areas to which people have fled.
"Communities tell us that they would like to see more peacekeepers patrolling the areas on foot, so that they feel safer," said Stoessel.
Oxfam called on MONUC to ensure that its resources are deployed in areas where they can best protect people at risk.
Oxfam this month significantly scaled up its life-saving emergency response by providing clean water, sanitation, and carrying out crucial hygiene promotion activities. Up to 150,000 additional people will benefit from this assistance.
With the military operations against the FDLR now expanding to South Kivu, Oxfam is also concerned for civilians there, with initial reports of thousands of people already fleeing in anticipation of increased violence and attacks. Oxfam has opened a new rapid response office in Bukavu, South Kivu, to be prepared for possible humanitarian fallout.
"What we have seen in North Kivu sets a terrible precedent for what may happen in South Kivu," said Stoessel. "Oxfam calls on all parties to the conflict, including the Government, to respect the life, dignity and property of civilians."
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According to UN figures, some 250,000 people in the provinces of North and South Kivu have been displaced since mid-January following a military operation targeting the FDLR rebel group. This is the equivalent to the numbers displaced last autumn when intense fighting broke out, with the newly displaced hidden in far and remote areas, the international aid agency said.
Marcel Stoessel, Head of Oxfam in the Democratic Republic of Congo said:
"The war is far from over for ordinary Congolese. These terrible human tragedies are happening in remote areas far away from television cameras, but this does not make the suffering less real for those concerned.
"Homes and shops are being looted and ransacked, women and girls are being raped, and civilians are being forced to flee, many for the third or fourth time. We are helping them pick up the pieces by increasing our emergency work. It is tragic to see Congo's civilians caught up in this awful violence yet again."
There also have been reports of armed men committing reprisal killings of civilians, blocking off roadways, in some cases burning down houses and chasing people away. In parts of Lubero, where most people are subsistence farmers, civilians can barely access their fields to harvest due to widespread insecurity and looting.
With the operations against the FDLR set to expand to South Kivu, there are mounting concerns for civilians there, several tens of thousands of whom have already been forced from their homes. Although, according to the UN, some 300,000 other people have returned to their homes in parts of the North Kivu, the calm in some areas, such as Rutshuru, has been accompanied by renewed insecurity in others, such as Lubero and Walikale.
Oxfam is developing a flexible response to the new crisis that can provide water, sanitation and life-saving hygiene promotion to dispersed groups of people on the move, as well as larger groups of people sheltering in specific areas. Fighting and insecurity has hampered humanitarian access this year, and a quicker and lighter response is required to reach people during windows of opportunity. Throughout eastern DRC, Oxfam is already assisting half a million people, and as a result of the scale up the agency will reach 650,000 people, despite ongoing security challenges. Teams have been sent to Lubero in North Kivu and Bukavu in South Kivu to plan the scale-up. In Lubero, Oxfam is already providing clean water and basic sanitation to 40,000 people newly displaced by the fresh fighting, especially to combat epidemics.
Stoessel continued:
"All parties to the conflict—including the government armed forces as well as militia groups—have to live up to their responsibility under international humanitarian law to protect civilians and to provide humanitarian agencies safe access to the civilians in need."
Oxfam said a lack of peacekeeping resources on the ground was also hampering efforts to protect civilians.
The Head of Oxfam International's New York office, Nicole Widdersheim, said, "More than four months after the UN Security Council approved 3,000 additional peacekeepers, not one extra soldier has arrived. Until the reinforcements come, MONUC needs to ensure that the troops on the ground are doing all in their power to protect people. Civilians need more foot patrols in towns and along the main roads in order to be kept as safe as possible."
With the UN Security Council set to discuss the MONUC peacekeeping force on Thursday this week, Oxfam is urging world leaders to mark the occasion by rapidly providing the extra troops needed. It also called on them to ensure that existing resources are deployed to the most insecure locations, so as to more effectively protect civilians.
]]>The team are training the hygiene promotion committees today in Mugunga camp today. The training is going well, but the team was called back into town early because of security concerns.
I wonder how many people died in the fighting over the last couple of days. The figure generally quoted of 5.4 million deaths (most due to the resulting lack of access to water and health services) due to the conflict over the last ten years just got bigger. The political history and current situation is very complex, with no simple solution.
We heard that the CNDP rebels have captured the Rumangabo army base and Virunga national park, which is home to the mountain gorillas, and today they attacked Kibumba, which is reported to be almost empty. The population of the town and the camps—around 30,000 people—has moved down to Kibati, 12 miles north of Goma. The Congolese government soldiers are fleeing, leaving MONUC [the United Nations mission in the Congo] to protect Goma. Many of the wounded are unable to get to the hospital.
The Mugunga camps currently have enough fuel to pump water until the weekend, but as there is a possibility that the security situation will deteriorate, so we're taking enough fuel out to them to last another week in case we get cut off from the camps.
Humanitarian agencies will need to get together tomorrow to decide how to act. Thousands of people demonstrated outside the MONUC base today, saying that the peace keepers are failing to protect the people here. We closed the office early. MONUC were told to stay in their base.
The MONUC commander has resigned.
This morning we have a security briefing. The shops and banks closed yesterday and are still closed today. The banks have removed all the money; they would be a prime target if Goma did get attacked. Our staff tell us they feel safer when they have some money in the house to give to the soldiers if their homes are targeted. When I stopped on the way home to buy bananas the women wanted to charge me extra because they thought I worked for MONUC.
I slept through the events of last night. Riots in the prison, where seven people were shot dead, about ten were recaptured and an unknown number escaped. I feel uneasy that escaped convicts could add to the unrest here! A doorman at a nightclub was also shot dead last night when he stopped someone with a firearm from entering. The situation in Goma could be described as tense!
We left work early again today. Only essential staff will be coming in tomorrow. Three international organizations have evacuated to Rwanda. This evening we hear that MONUC has retaken Kibumba and the situation now seems to be under control.
Today started as calmly as any other day. We went to the office as normal; there was less traffic and less staff, but otherwise it was a beautiful sunny day in Goma.
At 2:30pm, a message came over the radio that all NGO staff should remain in their bases. We immediately left the office, passing the gas station, which was full of Congolese army trucks filling up (then heading quickly in the opposite direction of the fighting). False rumors that the CNDP rebels had taken Goma airport created panic across Goma. MONUC have said they are protecting Goma as the Congolese government troops continue to flee. A vehicle, I think a taxi, lay on its side outside the hospital gate. I guess if you are going to have a nasty crash, that's not a bad place to do it.
All UN and international NGO staff are advised to go to the World Food Programme compound to plan a possible evacuation. I go home to pick up the bag that I packed last night (just in case!) and some food. As the afternoon passes and the sun goes down, the gunshots around the compound become more and more frequent. We are told that the fleeing army is looting town. I have never been this close to so much violence and gunfire. My mother phones, concerned; I hope that she cannot hear the fighting. I feel like we are a bunch of sitting ducks surrounded by armed troops. It is not safe to leave.
About 600 members of UN families, mainly women and children, are here with us. They take refuge in the large warehouse while we try, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep in the car. Before we settle down for the night, we hear that a ceasefire has been announced.
Thousands of the displaced are said to have fled to Kanyabayonga or to the Ugandan border. Oxfam will go and do an assessment to see what intervention is needed there.
Speaking to the public health team, they tell me that last night many people fled the camps where we work to hide in the fields. Nevertheless, there were still reports of rape and looting in the camps by the military. The health centers in the two Mugunga camps were reported to have been looted, though this has not been confirmed. Most people know someone who was killed in the violence last night in the town.
People continue to sleep in public buildings, with host families, and by the side of the road around Goma. We are busy planning how we can help them.
While the office in Goma remains closed, the staff that we have trained from the camps to pump and do water chlorination continue to do their work. The number of displaced people in the four Goma camps has remained stable—except for Mugunga 2, where some new arrivals are housed in large hangars—so our current water and sanitation provision is enough to provide for everyone living there. The water supply is fine and people in the camp continue to clean the toilets to stop the spread of disease.
But the army has set up four tents on the road to Buhimba camp; this is not good news for women there, who are often raped by armed men. I ask the public health team leader to ask the hygiene committee (made up of displaced people we work with in the camps) to broadcast by loud speaker the message that the women who have been raped have 72 hours to get to a health center to take anti-HIV medication.
Rather than spend another night in the car, international staff are temporarily relocated and spend the night in Rwanda.
The EU has pledged to send forces to reinforce the troops here. The Congolese are hopeful that they will arrive soon.
Some of the team attended a meeting in Goma to discuss the current humanitarian situation. Official UN figures are suggesting that 100,000 people have been displaced in the fighting of the past week.
The information that the IMC health center had been looted appears to be untrue, although both the Norwegian Refugee Council and ourselves have had supplies we keep in the camps stolen. Generally the camps seem to be returning to normal, although people are afraid.
Despite the American elections, the situation in the DRC is still the second news story on the television. The report shows the UN aid convoy that went to Rutshuru, an area under CNDP rebel control. There is also talk of the people starving due to the food crisis.
Despite the ceasefire, fighting continues in other parts of North Kivu, and although Goma is calm people are still nervous and afraid. The Prime Minister was in Goma today. We had a busy day planning our work and coordinating with the other agencies responding to the emergency in North Kivu.
For some strange reason there was only one news item all day today... The US has a new president! Joy and relief are visible across the globe.
Today we started our monthly soap distribution in the four camps where we work. We give soap to over 64,000 people as part of our cholera prevention work. We have also been visiting groups of displaced people in Goma and Kibati just a few hundred meters from the front line, home to thousands of people who have fled their homes and camps to escape the fighting in Kibumba. For many of them, this is the second or third time that they have been forced to flee.
Tomorrow we will find displaced people who were already community hygiene educators in their villages so that we can form new hygiene promotion committees here. Thousands of displaced people are staying with host families, in public buildings on porches, and under the stars (and we are in the rainy season!). When I spoke to the displaced people about their health, the illness they all talked about was diarrhea, particularly in young children. It is important that we start our hygiene promotion.
Today I am going south west to Kirotshe to do a public health assessment. Our first stop is a small camp of just over 4,000 people.
This camp looks different from the others. The latrines were full, so the people borrowed tools from the village and have started digging new pits, but there is a LOT of feces that are hard not to step in when you use the toilets. Our first job here will be to form hygiene committees who will teach their peers about why hygiene is important and mobilize this community to keep their latrines clean.
There is no source of water in the camp, but there is a tap in the village nearby, although it does not provide enough water for everyone so people here go to the lake to wash. We will need to train the community to construct private bathing areas and create a new water source.
People tell us that some women have been raped when they go to collect firewood for cooking. Where ever we go we see armed men: in the villages, on the road by the camps. While we walk around the camp we hear shooting and shelling from the hills behind. People seem nervous but they live with this every day. A visit to the health center shows that four cases of cholera have been diagnosed here in the past week.
On the way back to the office we stop at the health center in Sake. They have run out of the intravenous dehydration fluids needed to save the lives of people with severe diarrhea, so they have to send patients miles away to Kirotshe. I will follow this up tomorrow.
My day began with gruesome photos on the television of the bodies of people reportedly killed by CNDP rebels in Kiwanja. One woman gave the rebels the money they demanded but they still shot and killed her husband.
The public health team go out to Kibati to continue our work there, but they are forced to return to Goma by gunfire, which created huge panic amongst the displaced population there. Many were seen heading for the safety of Goma.
We are told by the UN to restrict movement and stay where we are.
]]>We had five staff there when the fighting broke out at 11:30 AM. They were beginning meetings with community members and were starting the digging of latrines. Then it happened. The shelling.
"It was between the volcano and the hill near the camp," said Herman, an Oxfam public health promoter, "about two kilometers away from the camp."
People were lining up to get their food distributions from the World Food Program and they suddenly scattered.
"They wanted to get to their shelters to grab their belongings," said Herman. "They knew they had to flee again."
The team reported that they saw one man in his forties crying. "I fled Kibumba camp and now they are chasing us again," he said. Another was more resigned, "We are used to this," he lamented. And sadly people are. Many people in the camp have fled for the third, fourth, fifth time.
Thousands ran toward Goma town. After a night of hiding with host families and in schools and churches, most have returned to the camp but remain scared and vulnerable. Even before this latest incident, the people in the camp were nervous. I can't even imagine the fear they feel now. The rebels have been pushed back northward, but there are just 700 meters between the positions of the rebels and the Congolese government forces. Oxfam is back there with teams today. These people need our help, but it is far from easy in the current insecure environment.
Last weekend, the UK Foreign Minister David Miliband and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner visited Goma. They came with much diplomatic fanfare and media attention, and they said good things. They called for urgent reinforcement of the UN peacekeeping troops, but they have failed to follow through and effectively protect civilians. Today, the European Union will meet to talk about the situation in the eastern Congo.
The people of Congo are still living on the edge with little protection. They urgently need the European Union to take action. Even before the fighting around Kibati, people were telling us about being attacked by armed groups when collecting firewood or food from the nearby fields.
While European Ministers are closeted in debating chambers today, hundreds of thousands of eastern Congolese will be eking out an existence in the region's squalid camps. They need real action, not another mountain of words. The EU must agree to send additional troops to support the UN in eastern Congo and must push for a ceasefire, so we can get aid to the people that desperately need it.
]]>Fidel had an 18-year-old brother who deserted the Mai-Mai, one of the eastern Congo's multitude of armed factions. Men from the group came looking for his brother at family home, but he wasn't there. Fidel was. They decided to take him instead.
"My mother begged and cried," he says. "The rebels said they'd spare me, if my mum paid them $100. But we were poor and didn't have the money."
As he was snatched away, his mother screamed. The soldiers said that they would kill her if she didn't shut up.
He still finds it difficult to play, he says. Even though he is now in safe place, he still has the memories.
"I used to carry ammunition for the soldiers as they fought on the front line. One day I saw 60 bodies dead in the battlefield. I knew then I needed to escape or I'd end up dead myself."
After six months of enduring beatings with sticks, Fidel managed to escape one night when the soldiers were sleeping. He ran two miles in darkness of the night until he reached the base of MONUC, the UN peacekeeping mission for Congo.
From there, he was taken to CAJED, a Congolese NGO that rehabilitates child soldiers and other vulnerable children, and helps them reintegrate back into the community. I am at the transitional center run by CAJED and UNICEF that aims to help the children come to terms with their trauma.
After they leave the center, CAJED keeps in contact with the boys and helps them adapt to civilian life. This is a difficult stage. In a country with grinding poverty and few job prospects, many child soldiers get re-recruited. CAJED's community work aims to prevent that, and Oxfam supports CAJED at this stage.
Alongside Fidel in the transitional center, I meet Michel. Michel wears a T-shirt with a rhino on it, and has flecks of vibrant green paint on his arms and forehead. He's been painting. But despite the familiar childhood activity he was in the midst of, his mood seems much darker than Fidel's. He spent four years with a rebel group and was forced to fight.
His story starts simply. He was abducted when he left his house to get some milk. He never returned. But then the horror escalates. Michel was taught to fight. He shot people and remembers jumping over bodies in the battlefield. His friend was taken prisoner by another armed group. They discovered him hanging from a tree with blood pouring from his ears and his nose. It is horrible to learn that a 12-year-old child has seen such scenes.
The stories of children like Fidel and Michel painfully underscore why we need to find an end to horrific violence that has plagued the eastern Congo for too long. Child protection agencies have reported that Mai Mai militia in the town of Rutshuru recruited 37 children into military service the week before last. An estimated 150 children have been forcibly recruited since heavy fighting resumed in August.
Congo's armed men need to put their weapons down and find a peaceful solution to this conflict. Five millionfour hundred thousand people have died in Congo's decade-long war. The people of eastern Congo have suffered too much. We need to push our politicians to keep up the diplomatic pressure and find a political solution to this harrowing war. Only then will we be able to confine the stories of Fidel and Michel to the history books.
Names have been changed to protect identities.
]]>Thousands more abandoned their villages and the temporary camps in which some were sheltering when fighting intensified in late October around Goma, the capital city of North Kivu Province directly across the border from Rwanda. The violence culminated in an armed stand-off outside the city on Oct. 29, and CNDP's call for a ceasefire. By November 7, that ceasefire was no longer holding.
The crisis has left the longer-term peace process—and a January ceasefire between the government and 22 armed groups—in shambles. The CNDP has claimed that the January peace agreement, which had been violated numerous times, favored the Congolese government and its forces.
The latest fighting follows more than a decade of conflict in the eastern provinces and stems back to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But many other factors contribute to the ongoing violence as well: weak state authority, the illegal exploitation of Congo's vast natural resources, and the free flow of arms across porous borders.
The result is disaster for the Congolese caught in the crossfire and suffering from the deprivation constant conflict brings. Humanitarian needs are escalating: The fighting forced some aid groups to suspend their operations, preventing life-saving help from reaching those who needed it. Since 1998, an estimated 5.4 million people have lost their lives to the conflict and the hunger and disease it unleashes.
In early November, Oxfam was already helping about 85,000 people, including 65,000 camped in four temporary settlements around Goma. The organization planned to help an additional 100,000 people in areas to the north and west of the city. Assistance has included the provision of clean water and sanitation services—essential in preventing the spread of waterborne diseases-- to those in the four camps. Oxfam has also been trucking water to 20,000 people in Kanyabayonga north of Goma.
Oxfam is calling for:
My neighborhood was one of the worst affected by the fighting, which went on all last night. About two kilometers from my house, the gunmen went into a compound and killed seven innocent civilians. Our neighbors were attacked by gunmen who came into their compound and robbed them, taking mobile phones and money. We were okay, but I found some bullets in my compound.
I was in the Oxfam office when the panic started yesterday. People saw the national army troops leaving Goma with their tanks and vehicles, and at the same time they saw the UN troops shifting civilians to a safer compound. No one informed the population about what was happening, and they thought the rebels were going to take control of Goma. People panicked.
Many people took advantage of the panic yesterday to make trouble. They looted shops and robbed families. It was a mixture of people fighting, criminals, and undisciplined soldiers, using small arms like AK-47s. But in other areas there was a deployment of national army units who were disciplined and protected the people. I haven't seen UN soldiers anywhere myself.
Today, it's calm and very quiet. Usually the traffic here starts at six in the morning, but I looked out at 10AM and all I saw was one motorbike. The shops are all shut. Life hasn't started up yet.
A lot of people are displaced and are living in the suburbs of Goma in very harsh conditions, and the fighting is making those conditions even worse because there's no access for humanitarian workers.
In particular, one group of displaced people has now been forced to move for the third time in a couple of months. They are living in schools and hospitals, or with host families in and around Goma. They desperately need water, food, and shelter. There's no health care or medicines. People are living in the open air, and if they do get a little food it's not enough to feed the whole family.
This current crisis has made it harder for Oxfam to respond. We are watching the situation and I'm going out this afternoon to check out our work in the camps.
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