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| Ngulu Kishigho (r.), a farmer with 13 children, has fled his home four times in the past year. They both are among 65,000
newly displaced people. Some 700,000 in all are displaced in eastern Congo. Scott Baldauf |
Flood of refugees amid Congo conflict
Fresh fighting between the Army and Tutsi rebels has prompted new camps of displaced persons to spring up suddenly in the past three weeks, taxing efforts of relief workers to provide food and adequate shelter.
By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the September 27, 2007 edition
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MUGUNGA, CONGO - In a field of dried lava outside of Goma, some 20,000 Congolese villagers arrived en masse in mid-September, building huts in clusters and sending children in search of food and firewood. They had fled their homes after a new bout of fighting between government troops and ethnic Tutsi rebels.
The political crisis has challenged the international community and the new Congolese government for solutions, but has also created a humanitarian emergency that has propelled an estimated 65,000 displaced civilians from their homes.
The timing is particularly bad. It is the start of the rainy season, a time when most of these villagers should be out planting crops of beans, maize, and cassava. A lost planting season means hunger and could spur civil unrest.
"This was the planting time, and I didn't have the time to cultivate," says Ngulu Kishigho, who fled his home in Kimoka a few weeks ago, just days after fighting erupted on Aug. 27. Speaking of the ethnic Tutsi rebel, Gen. Laurent Nkunda, he shouts, "Nkunda made us flee. If you kick his men out of there, we will go back. We don't want to stay even one day longer in this place."
Humanitarian groups were just beginning to meet the massive needs of the estimated 300,000 civilians who were displaced by Congo's deadly civil war of 1997-2003, in which invading armies from Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe moved in to topple the tottering dictatorship of former President Mobutu Sese Seko.
But old issues, including the presence of a Rwandan ethnic Hutu militia blamed for the genocide of Tutsis in 1994 on Congolese soil, were left unaddressed by the government. When three Tutsi businessmen were murdered in December 2006, General Nkunda launched an all-out war on the government and the Hutu rebels, claiming his role as protector of his Tutsi community.
"We already had 650,000 displaced people in the Eastern Congo before this crisis began last December," says Sylvie Vanden Wildenberg, spokeswoman for the UN Mission in Congo (MONUC) in Goma. "Humanitarian aid was supposed to be switching from an emergency phase to reconstruction, which is now impossible. The whole situation is creating huge suffering."
"If they are going to find a solution soon, this will help our efforts," says Patrick Lavand'Homme, head of the UN Office of Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance in Goma. Noting that North Kivu Province alone accounts for half of the country's people displaced by war, he adds, "If not, it's not going to be just 300,000. We're going to see 100,000 or 200,000 more."
Compared with the estimated 2.5 million Sudanese displaced by the conflict in Darfur, Congo's emergency may seem small. Yet time and hard work have transformed the chaotic Darfur camps of 2004 into orderly cities. Just three weeks old, the new Congolese camps have largely appeared overnight, without planning. The challenge of providing food, shelter, toilet facilities, and medical care for tens of thousands of people – especially during the torrential east African rainy season – puts severe strains on humanitarian staffers and current aid channels.
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