Glenna Gordon
4 November 2007
Kisoro — MS Makulata Nyirabazungu, 60, walked from Congo to Uganda without any shoes. She left her village early in the morning amidst loud and rapid gunfire about a week ago, fleeing the surging violence which has led to the latest influx of more than 13,000 refugees from the Kivu region of eastern DR. Congo to Nyakabanda Transit Camp in south western Uganda, about 15 kilometres from the border the two countries share.
"I do not have shoes. Where can I get them?" said Makulata, whose cracked heels attest to her long journey. "I can move, but at a slow pace, because if I step on a stone I feel pain."
The Nyakabanda Transit Camp covers a huge swath of territory, lush green grass surrounded by rolling hills, now covered with small tents built out of plastic sheeting. As one can imagine, refugees are scattered almost everywhere trying to make meals out of their meagre rations. Potato peels, sugar cane husks and garbage litter the ground; smoke, children's cries and the native language of these Congolese refugees, Ufumbira, fill the air.
"I will leave this place when I hear the war has ended in Congo," said Makulata. The old woman who donned a blue blouse with trim that was once, very long ago, probably brilliant and delicate white, but showed as many signs of age as its owner. "We will stay here until then. We don't want to go back when there is war in Congo."
At the current rate of things, Makulata may be staying in Uganda for quite a while. Rebel leader and renegade Congolese general, Laurent Nkunda, and his men have allegedly been committing every type of crime against humanity imaginable ever since he split from the Congolese National Army in 2002, all the while laying a claim to the mandate to protect ethnic Tutsis of Congo, the Banyamulenge, from purported ethnic cleansing.
Nkunda's men, like almost every other armed person in the war-wracked eastern DR Congo, had reportedly engaged in orgies of rape, torture, looting, destruction of porperty; basically, violated the very sanctity a human has, with a particular penchant for vicious sexual violence.
This is why people like Makulata are now refugees in Uganda again, although Nkunda has used every opportunity to deny the above allegations.
"Nkunda brings chaos, stealing, violence and killing," said Makulata. She should know as she has lost five sons and grandsons to the fighting. They are missing: they maybe conscripted, they could be dead, possibly murdered.
"Soldiers came at night and started beating and killing and murdering. When I heard about war in Rwanda, I feared it would happen in my village. Now in Rwanda there is peace and in Congo there is war," she lamented while referring to 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Nkunda argues that he must protect the Tutsis from the after-effects of the Rwandan genocide, during which as many as 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered. Some argue that Nkunda's mission is being quietly supported by Rwandan President Paul Kagame, though Rwandan Ambassador to Uganda Ignatius Kamali denied these charges as indeed his government has done before.
"That is not correct. Rwanda is not supporting Nkunda at all. These are Congolese Tutsis and the conflict is in Congo, not Rwanda," Kamali told Sunday Monitor on Thursday last week.
There have been recent moves to disarm Nkunda and his men, to which Nkunda initially agreed, but when the date and time arrived, they were no where to be seen. DR Congo President Joseph Kabila has said he will forcibly disarm Nkunda, but critics question his ability to do so given Congo's limited and stretched resources, and also given the difficulty in monitoring armed forces.
"I voted for Kabila, but the people I voted for have disappeared and now we don't get any help from them," said Makulata, discouraged. "This is the third or fourth time some of the refugees have been displaced because of instability in the North Kivu," said Aden Ilmi, the Senior Emergency Coordinator for Southwest Uganda United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR).
"There are many violations of human rights. The refugees don't know whom to trust. There are many militias and the central government is weak."
Makulata and her daughter first fled to Uganda last December when the fighting was especially bad, but returned after a few days when things quietened down. UNHCR fears that this fifth influx since December of 2006 is different because, according to Ilmi, "this time [the refugees] came with luggage."
Ilmi and his colleagues plan to resettle the refugees at a more permanent site because a refugee camp, by law, must be at least 90 kilometres from the border. Estimates are that since December 2006, the number of newly displaced refugees in North Kivu has reached 370,000 and continues to grow.
Uganda's Office of the Prime Minister representative, Douglas Asiimwe said, optimistically, that, "As the government, we allow the refugees in and this is assistance. Only a few whose areas are in real trouble are going to be permanently settled camps. Everyone else will stay for a few weeks and then return home. We are hoping the situation will settle down."
Those refugees willing to be relocated to the permanent settlement camp in Nakivale will start being relocated as early as this week, while others will remain at Nyakabanda.
Ilmi says that very few refugees have chosen to return home, mainly men who have gone to clear their land.
With the recent surrender of the Mai Mai forces, another rebel group running amok in Eastern Congo, there has been some calm in the violence in the Kivus for the past few days.
"We don't have problems," said General Vainqueur Mayala Vichana, the national army's commander in charge of Ituri. "The refugees are afraid. They are going themselves because they don't want to stay in Congo. Today there is no fighting, and yesterday also, and yesterday before also," Gen. Vichana said in halting English
But to refugees who have been living in the Kivu region of Eastern Congo, it really isn't a matter of "want."
Many refugees have been staying in the bush for months, fearing for their lives if they returned to their villages, inhabited by bands of marauding militiamen.
Makulata and her remaining unmarried daughter, just 15-years-old, had been staying in the bush, fearing soldiers all the while - and with good reason: Nkunda's men are reportedly especially sadistic towards women. A fact that may have contributed to the following comment by Mr Hohn Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, to the New York Times on October 7:
"The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world. The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity -- it's appalling."
Though they had heard gunfire in the distance for weeks, as the soldiers encroached on their carefully hidden spot in the bush, Makulata dreading the sanctity of her remaining unmarried daughter, made the decision to flee again.
They quickly fled from their village, Kinyamahura, carrying just a basin to wash in, and leaving before Makulata could grab a pair of shoes. They knew it was time to leave the Congo once again.
"I don't know when the war in Congo will end. I've been here one week, and I will stay until there is peace," said Makulata. "Here life is a bit good if you can get food and plastic sheets, but I have not gotten blankets, food, or plastic sheets."
Without any resources, she has been forced to beg for food and rely on the small rations she can get. But without a pot to cook with, she has been roasting potatoes for herself and her daughter on an open fire, when she can get them.
Though UNHCR has brought supplies for 15,000 people, and plans to bring supplies for another 15,000 people as they expect more refugees to continue flooding through the border town of Bunagana, not everyone has received rations or plastic sheeting to build tents. "All I want is food and plastic sheets and peace in Congo," said Makulata.
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