There is a long, narrow bridge in the eastern Congo that women cross before climbing down to wash on the pale rocks below. Beneath its slatted deck, the sweep of the Ulindi, a tributary of the Congo itself, starts a slide into rapids. Here, not so long ago, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were murdered.
"Over on those rocks," a man who was crossing the bridge said, fiddling with the cross around his neck. "That was where they killed. They threw the bodies into the water." Another said: "The refugees reached the bridge and they couldn't cross and they were driven into the water." In their war-weary minds, it was not the bloodletting that upset the most, but the numbers who drowned.
"So many," a man who had been employed to count refugees explained. "There were 84,000 in one camp and 38,000 in the other and they all tried to get across the bridge. There were missing sections then and many fell through, or they were driven down the banks and tried to swim." It happened just where the river, already wide and powerful, picks up speed. This massacre, a response to genocide, has never been written of before.
PHOTOS: AGENCIES
I first came to Shabunda, a pretty town of wattle houses, destroyed Belgian avenues and gold-bearing dirt when the Democratic Republic of Congo was still Zaire. Mobutu Sese Seko, despot for 30 years, had returned to Kinshasa, the capital, to announce that he - "Le pere de la nation" - would repel the invaders who had cut into the distant eastern borders. It was Christmas 1996 and Shabunda was on the front line. Refugee camps had formed and the International Committee of the Red Cross was flying in food, attempting to see off famine.
The reasons for the conflagration in west-central Africa, a war that would suck in eight countries and cost between three and four million lives, are as convoluted as they are tragic - but they come down to Rwanda's genocide, the clash between the Tutsis, once promoted by the Belgians and now determined to protect themselves, and the Hutus - the downtrodden who had had enough.
PHOTOS: AGENCIES
BEYOND THE PALE
The refugees were, for the most part, Hutus, many of whom had been responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994. Mixed in among the distressed and innocent were members of the infamous Interahamwe, those who had slaughtered their neighbors as "cockroaches." Despite killing just short of one million people, they failed in their attempts to annihilate a whole group of people, and in 1994 were driven out of Rwanda by the brilliant Tutsi general, Paul Kagame. The Hutus established camps just beyond the Rwandan border and for a while were relatively secure. Then, in 1996, Kagame decided to act, backing an invasion of the area by the Zairean rebel Laurent Kabila.
As the vast camps of Hutus emptied under the assault, Kagame told the refugees they had nothing to fear in coming home to Rwanda and many complied, forming great columns on the volcanic landscape of Goma and the green hills of Bukavu that are still the enduring image of that time.
Some refugees, who didn't believe they would be safe in Rwanda, headed in the opposite direction, further into Zaire. Some were undoubtedly members of the Interahamwe, but many were innocent, scared and did not know which way to go to remain safe. "I just followed," one woman said. "Everybody was running and I just followed."
In Shabunda a group of 212 unaccompanied children established themselves in three rooms of the old Belgian hospital. They had walked for days from Bukavu and Goma and, as one of their guardians said, many were too tired even to eat. One of them was Habrahams Nduharungua, a grubby 12-year-old orphaned son of a taxi driver with a rubber tube as a necklace. On Christmas Day he struggled over a lunch of beans.
With Kabila's troops approaching from the east, the Red Cross head of mission in the town had to make an appalling decision. Her team was being threatened by the small contingent of Zairean troops Mobutu's forces had left behind to form a rearguard, men who knew they would stand no chance against Rwanda's well-drilled soldiers. The troops were determined to get on the Red Cross' 54-year-old Dakota plane and escape. They seemed increasingly likely to use violence. So the Red Cross left, and me with them, abandoning anything that could not be carried while running for that Dakota. The refugees, including the 212 children, were left by the Ulindi. For the past 10 years I have wanted to know what happened next.
Muzungu Kimanzenze, a farmer and woodsman, lives in the forest next to where the largest of the refugee camps had been and remembered the day the Rwandan troops came. "[They] arrived at 10 in the morning. The refugees who were strong left the camp and ran to the bridge but it was in a poor state and it was difficult to cross. The Rwandans followed and began to kill people there. Then they turned back and began to burn the camp. All the refugees who remained - the old, women, children and the feeble - were killed and burnt. If you go into the bush, you find bones. Some of the bodies were dropped in the latrines." He led me to a patch of forest at the other end of the camp, right next to the village cemetery and, growing increasingly angry, said that he and other Congolese had been forced by the Rwandans to dig a mass grave there. He didn't know how many bodies were thrown in.
Further along the track, just beyond the metal bridge that spans the Ulindi 11km north of the Shabunda, is Constantin Kiliki, a fisherman and farmer. The bridge, built by the Belgian colonists in 1956, is narrow, with a slatted deck and two runners for traffic that rarely comes. "There are two types of death," Kiliki said. "One is a public one and the other is hidden away. Kabila didn't want people to know how many were killed, but there were so many corpses they could not hide them all. Some were just left, others were eaten by birds and that caused an epidemic because of the flies on the bodies."
Beyond Kiliki's house the road splits, with one branch leading to Shabunda and the other heading west. The surviving refugees turned west, where the scenery grows beautiful, the road bordered by mahogany, ironwood and palm, dipping into swamp and rising to provide a view across the treetops. Each kilometer is marked by new murder stories. The refugees were hunted down. In Mpakisi, the elders said the Tutsis caught nine refugees: "There was a doctor among them. They were led through the village and killed in the swamp with rifle butts."
Twenty kilometers further is the Kingangala bridge at Matila. Zaina Mangene, with the tiny feet of a small baby sticking from either side of her waist, is from the village and told of a communal grave of 30. "It was an ambassador, six of his family, and their friends. They were killed with knives." She said she would show me the grave.
And it would go on, all the way west to the Congo river. Kabila's men wouldn't let organizations such as the Red Cross into the east at the time. They needed, they said, to "secure" the area. What this meant in Shabunda was a man called "Jackson," a Tutsi commander who led a modern version of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, searching house to house for Hutus.
Prosper Kigulube was, in more prosperous times, an accountant. He is in his seventies now and has seen three wars, in 1964 and 1967, but the latest, he said, was the cruelest. "Jackson used to keep people locked up here and then he would take them down to the river and execute them."
That was 1997 but genocide has a long tail, one that will last longer than many lifetimes. The persecution of the Jews shapes the world to this day and the consequence of Rwanda are proving similar in Africa.
Deposing Mobutu, Kabila installed himself as President in Kinshasa only to fall out with his Rwandan backers. He was shot in 2001 by one of his bodyguards and his son Joseph took over. A second war had begun, with Kagame invading once more, taking Shabunda without a fight. But in the forests the Congolese had had enough of these invaders. There was already a group called the Mayi Mayi, populated by murderous oddities who believed that, if they were covered with a powerful medicine, bullets would melt in front of them. The Mayi Mayi reformed itself into a nationalist militia, and forged an alliance with the surviving refugees who had avoided the genocide death squads in the thick jungle.
The Mayi Mayi leader was General Joseph Padiri, "The Priest." He forced men and boys into service. Bulelo Kingombe, who lives three days' walk from Shabunda, saw his brother taken off to fight: "I have been very sad since because I have been alone," he said. Shabunda became a town under siege but it was the outlying villagers who suffered most. "It was very sad," said Muzungu Kimanzenze, the woodsman who lived beside the refugee camp. "The Hutu refugees who we had taken in were Interahamwe and began to kill us and destroy our villages." But it was rape that, for five years, became the prime weapon of war.
Helene Bampa is elegant, genteel and dignified. In Shabunda she has formed an association to fight against sexual violence. "So many women were raped, we tried to make a census," she said. "In the town itself there were at least 500. Outside, I don't know, it was so many.
There were no exceptions. Children, young women, old women, even the pregnant. Some died afterwards. They were raped by as many as 10 soldiers. Some were raped in front of their neighbors and the soldiers would make the people clap."
No military group held back. When the soldiers grew tired, they raped with sticks. There are reports of women being forced to kill their children, and of violations with guns during which the trigger was pulled. "Some of the women were ashamed to tell they were raped," said Bampa. "Some men divorced their wives afterwards. I wanted to improve the dignity of the women. Sometimes, when you've been raped, no one wants to sit next to you because of the bad smell of the urine. I wanted to get help."
THE LEGACY OF RAPE
Bampa herself was raped on the road to the bridge by Rwandan soldiers. The Red Cross worker she had taken along as protection was killed. She was pregnant and lost her baby. Nyalya, the wife of Kiliki the fisherman, was so badly injured she had to be taken to Bukavu for treatment for a fistula, an injury found here only when girls fall pregnant when very young.
In Europe the context of the Rwandan genocide has long been settled. Films like Hotel Rwanda and books such as Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families have laid out the story. The reprisals at the bridge and subsequent rape of Shabunda are epilogues.
Yet the genocide keeps on. It poisoned the nations around Rwanda, and led to a continental war - about resources, about revenge - but always about Rwanda's desire to be secure, to avoid a repeat of 1994. That is the reason, not a hangover of imperialism, nor the greed of western corporations, that the women of the eastern Congo were raped.
Peace of a sort has finally come to Shabunda. Elections were held last year in Congo, which the 36-year-old Joseph Kabila won.
Of Habraham and the other orphans I had met 10 years ago, there was no sign. Leon Kekwa, an assistant at the hospital, was there when I visited last. "When the Rwandan troops arrived, the children heard about it and the next day the three rooms were empty. They had fled in the night." Nobody knows their fate.
13 years of conflict
April 1994
Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's Hutu president, is killed when his plane is shot down over Kigali airport.
April-June 1994
Following decades of hatred and sporadic massacres, the Hutu population tries to destroy the Tutsi hold over Rwanda, killing at least 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis.
July 1994
Forces commanded by Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, take the capital, Kigali. A cease-fire is declared and two million Hutus flee into Zaire, then stagnating under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
1996
Forces commanded by Zairean rebel Laurent Kabila cross the border to attack Mobutu's army. His troops are backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
1997
Kabila takes Zaire's capital, Kinshasa, and Mobutu falls. His exile in Portugal ends shortly after his arrival when he dies of prostate cancer. Zaire is renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo.
1998
Kabila falls out with his backers in Rwanda and Uganda, who attack again, but he retains control of the country with the aid of Angola, Chad, Namibia, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Jan. 2001
Kabila is assassinated and he is replaced by his son Joseph. He tries to negotiate the exit of Rwandan troops from the eastern edges fringes of the country, with limited success.
July 2002
The Pretoria Accord paves the way for a transitional government in Kinshasa.
July 2006 to present
Multiparty elections are held and Kabila wins the presidency with 58 percent of the vote. There is still fighting between forces of the new 'integrated' Congolese army and Rwandan Hutu rebel groups hiding in the forests of the east. The UN is trying to keep the peace. Source: the guardian
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