In April, former rebel fighters, who had been integrated into the Congolese army, mutinied. Dubbing themselves M23, or Mouvement 23, they took control of an area close to the borders of Rwanda and Uganda. When the Congolese army called up troops from across the region to quell the rebellion, that deployment left a security vacuum, prompting other rebel groups and militia to reassert their control.
Now, caught in the crossfire, civilians face appalling abuse at the hands of multiple armed groups. One town—Kashuga in northern Masisi—was attacked 12 times between April and July. In a new report, Commodities of War, Oxfam has documented how these waves of conflict have affected more than 760,000 people so far this year.
“Ruthless militias and government troops are both mercilessly exploiting local communities to help fund their war,” said Elodie Martel, Oxfam’s associate country director. Forced labor and recruitment, illegal taxation, and pillaging are all tactics in this conflict, along with rape, kidnap, and murder.
“These armed men enter our homes and demand money. If you don’t give it, they will kill you,” said one man from Fizi in South Kivu.
“Men no longer walk around this village since they are the ones who are taken, mostly,” added a woman from Kalehe in South Kivu.
As insecurity and uncertainty mount, the pressure on people is growing.
“More than 50,000 people have fled camps and homes since yesterday and are in dire need of shelter, water, and food,” said Tariq Riebl on Monday. Riebl is Oxfam’s humanitarian coordinator in Goma, the threatened capital of North Kivu and one of Congo’s larger cities around which cluster camps for displaced people. “Families have been split up overnight and people are desperately going between sites trying to find loved ones. If fighting intensifies further, there are very few places people can go for safety.”
Oxfam is aiming to reach about 230,000 people affected by this new crisis and since July has been responding to the needs of families in three camps near Goma. As of Tuesday the organization had helped 123,000 with clean water, sanitation services, and protection support. And public health teams have launched education campaigns to reduce the risk that waterborne diseases, such as cholera, could spread. But the largest of the camps, Kanyaruchina, where Oxfam has been building 700 latrines and 120 bathing stalls, is now deserted after people were forced to flee again.
For people of the eastern provinces, the violence is a grim reminder of how weak Congo’s national justice system is. Coupled with a lack of state authority and an ill-trained and poorly paid army, the consequence of that weakness has been decades of sporadic conflict triggered in part by ethnic tensions and disputes over land and resources. The danger and volatility make it very difficult for people to earn a living and have pulled many deeper into poverty.
“This war brings us extreme poverty and leave many killed,” a woman from Rutshuru in North Kivu told Oxfam. “Children no longer go to school and people flee to zones that are somehow safe. Those who return to their village to work their land to provide for their families are killed during clashes, or raped when a woman or girl is alone in the field.”
Oxfam is calling for an immediate halt to the fighting so that humanitarian aid can reach more civilians, especially those who have been displaced.
]]>Many of the displaced people are now sheltering with host families and often crowded into single-room houses with poor access to clean water and sanitation. To help meet their needs, Oxfam has set up a rapid response office in Bukavu, a city in the province of South Kivu, and is scaling up its work in North Kivu province.
Together with a local organization, Oxfam is now trucking 200,000 liters of clean water each day into major population centers, such as Lubero in North Kivu, where many displaced people have sought refuge. The organizations are also working to rehabilitate the water systems in those communities and Oxfam is distributing essential household items such as soap and buckets.
Though Oxfam is now helping 130,000 additional people, insecurity is making the delivery of this life-saving aid difficult in some areas. Fighters have cut off the roads to places such as Walikale in North Kivu and also to parts of South Kivu. Oxfam is calling on all parties to the conflict to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law and let aid through.
The harsh conditions many displaced people now face follow on the heels of the escalating violence they have endured in the months since the military offensive began. In a recent survey Oxfam conducted, villagers recounted the horrors of rape, torture, forced labor, and reprisal attacks. One woman told Oxfam she had been raped nine times. Other people talked about underground rooms where villagers were beaten and plunged in barrels of salt water. Residents of one community said their entire village emptied out at night, with everyone preferring to sleep in the fields rather than in their own homes. It was safer in the open, they said.
Who is attacking the civilians in Congo? In the survey, which included nearly 600 interviews, villagers reported that both the Congolese army and members of the FDLR were responsible for the atrocities. Earlier this year, members of militia and a rebel group were hastily integrated into the Congolese army, which has led to human rights abuses. Civilians surveyed said that one of the solutions to the trauma they have endured would be to improve the discipline, pay, and training of the Congolese army many of whose members—especially those newly integrated—have not been paid. As a consequence, extortion is widespread.
The UN's peacekeeping force—known as MONUC and the largest of its kind in the world—has a broad mandate in this conflict. While MONUC is reportedly providing rations and logistical support to the Congolese army, Oxfam maintains that the force's main priority should be to protect civilians, and it's concerned that there are not enough safeguards in place for that protection. Oxfam is calling on MONUC to set conditions for its involvement in these operations which, at the moment, are having a devastating impact on civilians.
For example, Oxfam says that MONUC should ensure that the Congolese government is taking clear steps to minimize the impact of this military initiative on civilians by not deploying officers with a documented record of human rights violations and by punishing violations committed by its own forces. The peacekeeping force should withhold its support of the operation if abuses continue, says Oxfam.
The organization also says that the international community needs to recognize that military action alone will not provide the answer for the insecurity that has plagued eastern Congo for so long. In the Oxfam survey, the vast majority of communities affected by the FDLR called for peaceful dialogue, and only two favored forced disarmament. Time and investment need to be put into non-military methods of disarming militia. And there needs to be a widespread recognition that sustainable peace will come to Congo only when the root causes of the conflict have been addressed.
]]>There, on the shore behind what's left of a half-constructed mansion, the chug-chug-chug of a diesel pump holds the promise of clean water for 11,042 people at Buhimba camp. They are just some of more than one million villagers forced to flee their homes as conflict has swept across the eastern provinces of that vast country. A short distance away, a second pump, submerged deep in the lake, provides water for an additional 18,016 people in two other camps known as Mugunga I and II.
Without clean water, without decent sanitation, and without the public health outreach that helps people understand the link between the two, waterborne diseases could ripple through theses camps with devastating consequences. That's what Oxfam, together with its local partner, Action Santé Femme, or ASAF, was determined to prevent when it helped establish the water systems for these three camps—and a fourth, Bulengo—outside Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. Through a network of rigid plastic pipes, storage tanks, and outdoor faucets, water from Lake Kivu now gushes into the jerry cans of thousands of families with the turn of a tap.
At the top of a short but steep hill at Buhimba, where two massive water storage tanks frame the sprawling camp below, Helene Kanyere Ndakas stands ready with a notebook in hand. She is the manager of this storage station—and knows better than almost anybody the importance of making sure the system runs smoothly.
What gives her that special knowledge?
Ndakas herself relies on the water that flows from it. She and her family are among the thousands of people who are now making their homes temporarily at Buhimba.
Flipping her notebook open, Ndakas points to the careful records she keeps each time she opens the valves to refill the tanks with lake water. And she notes the amount of chlorine that goes in to guarantee its cleanliness. Hired by Oxfam, Ndakas is on water duty from 6am to 4pm each day—a job she takes very seriously.
"People are depending on her," says Charles Mampasu, an Oxfam program manager in Goma. "And they're happy with her job."
In a place where there was little or no infrastructure to support a water system, supplying tens of thousands of people with clean water on an emergency basis has been no small feat. And making sure they continue to have access to it when Oxfam moves on to its next project is one of the organization's central concerns. That's why Oxfam is working hand-in-hand with ASAF to help it build its ability to handle the water system on its own, particularly in Mugunga camps.
A tour through Mugunga I shows how important a steady supply of clean water can be—especially when people are struggling with such harsh living conditions. Built on fields of sharp volcanic rocks, the shelters many people now call home are not even tall enough in which to stand. Made from grasses and dried banana leaves flung over a frame of saplings and topped with a plastic sheet, the huts offer only minimal protection from the elements. To keep warm—and to drive the bugs out—many people cook on small wood fires inside their huts, the smoke curling into their lungs and out through the cracks in the shelter walls.
At the health clinic, the nurse on duty reports that respiratory infections are among the most common medical problems he sees. About 150 people a day flock to the clinic with a host of ailments that also include malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. The latter is what the clean water—and scores of latrines that Oxfam has also installed—help to fight.
Snaking across the rocks, over roots, and through the mud, a network of wide black plastic pipes carries the water from Lake Kivu. It's replacing a temporary supply that another agency had been trucking in daily and storing in two plump water bladders—they look like giant egg yokes when full—at a cost of $3,500 a week. Nearby, the water blasts from faucets when kids turn on the taps to fill plastic jugs before lugging them home.
The water jug of choice for many kids has a familiar look: it's the container that once carried their family's allotment of cooking oil, doled out during the regular food distributions that displaced people have no choice but to depend on. Here at Mugunga, nothing goes to waste—not the jugs, and not the precious water they carry.
]]>Byakupita Wabinwa, president of the management committee that oversees the Kabimba health clinic, is standing below the sign. He is a small and serious man with a serious problem—one that plagues not only his community but that crops up frequently in this region of Democratic Republic of Congo: cholera.
Here, in the eastern provinces where years of conflict have taken a toll on social services, outbreaks of the waterborne disease are just one of the consequences of underinvestment in everything from roads, to health clinics, to clean water.
Sometimes, if maintenance of the simple delivery system has been lax, the water at this clinic doesn't run at all. That's why an enormous black cylinder is lying on its side in the clinic's front yard. It's a storage tank, waiting for installation as part of Oxfam's program to help ensure the clinic has a reliable reserve of water as well as decent sanitation facilities. In the back of the yard, a pair of pit latrines and two bathing stalls are under construction. And nearby, deep in the ground, lies the newly dug "placenta pit"—the local solution for disposing of hazardous medical wastes including afterbirth from the maternity ward.
Though it has no doctor and just five nurses, this is a busy place—serving an area with nearly 14,000 people. About 75 make their way here each week—some walking two hours down from the mountains—to receive treatment for malaria, to get tested for tuberculosis, to fight the cholera that erupts from time to time, especially during the rainy season.
Tacked to the door of one of the buildings is a sign, warning with explicit detail in Swahili, about the symptoms of cholera. It urges those who've got them to head for the nearest health clinic as soon as possible.
On this day, there are no cholera sufferers at the Kabimba clinic. But sometimes, during outbreaks, as many as 20 people a week come for treatment, though there is hardly the space for them. People lug their own bedding with them and spread it on the floor. A small building—about 30 feet long by 15 feet wide—serves as a quarantine area.
"But how can you put 20 people in that building and keep them healthy?" asks Wabinwa.
Inside, the walls are grimy with stains and the ceiling is collapsing. Of the original 10 cholera beds—mattresses with holes in the center beneath which buckets can be placed—only three remain. The plastic covering on one of the mattresses has pulled away, exposing the foam around the hole and leaving it like a sponge to sop up germs. A rickety wooden rack serves as a post for the intravenous drip.
As primitive and ill-supplied as the Kabimba clinic is by western standards, Trish Morrow, Oxfam's public health team leader for rural villages around Uvira, assures visitors that it's better than many that serve some of Congo's 62 million people, vast numbers of whom live in poverty. Few have the resources to pay for much medical care at all, but many live at risk of contracting serious diseases—like cholera—to which that poverty, with cruel irony, exposes them.
Nowhere is that more clear, perhaps, than along the stretch of land between the Mulongwe and Kavimvira rivers just outside of Uvira, South Kivu province.
It's there, between those two central sources of water, that the greatest number of cholera cases in the area erupt, says Jill Markvorsen, Oxfam's program manager for Uvira. During the first week of January, an outbreak almost reached epidemic proportions. At the cholera clinic in Uvira, workers charted 64 cases of the disease&mdasdh;one shy of the number that would have triggered the implementation of Uvira health zone's cholera contingency plan. Instead, officials, staffers from Oxfam and other aid groups, and volunteers from the Red Cross managed the flare-up by chlorinating water sources, making public health announcements on the radio, and providing information to people about measures they could take to improve hygiene and sanitation.
A few months later, in mid-March, both banks of the Mulongwe River are teeming with activity. Not far from one edge, a bare-bottomed boy dashes behind a bush and squats to relieve himself. Pigs root in a heap of rubbish that inches, black and slippery with mud, almost into the water. It rushes by filled with silt. Men wash their clothes. Others drive trucks and cars into the shallows to rinse off the dust and dirt. Up stream, a market crowded with people hugs the bank.
For those who have no other source, the Mulongwe River also serves as their supply for drinking water. It's no wonder then that cholera, caused by ingesting water or food contaminated by the bacterium vibrio cholerae, is one of the ugly facts of life for people living in this war-torn region.
At the Uvira cholera clinic, Oxfam helped to install a large tank that stores a backup supply of water—collected from the roof during rainstorms and precious for its relative purity. Two large rooms—one for men and the other for women—serve as sick wards. Simple beds—wood frames with sheets of rugged plastic stretched taut across and cut in the center with a hole—are scattered about the rooms. Others are piled outside.
The wards are empty on this mid-March day—a good sign.
Morrow, the public health team leader, says that the medical staff in Uvira has been trained well to provide patients with good care. Though there is not so much it can do to prevent people from contracting a disease that's so closely linked to the lack of public services—like potable water—the staff has been successful, says Morrow, in stemming the tide of cholera deaths.
And in a place where basic precautions take on ominous importance, blue buckets filled with a mixture of water and a heavy dose of chlorine dot the perimeter of the clinic's yard. All visitors are advised to scrub their hands with that solution before they leave. Most do—and duck out smelling like a swimming pool in the western world, but grateful for it.
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