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 This week marks the five-year anniversary of the fall of Bunia, a tiny
trading town in northeastern Congo where over five hundred people were massacred
by ethnic militia in a blood spree for gold and plunder. Many of those killed
were then mutilated and their organs eaten on the killing floor.
As a reporter who covered the direct lead-up and aftermath of this carnage (I
escaped just hours before the siege), the first week of May never goes by
without a moment of reflection and pause. I'd grown up in a Texas Pentecostal
church, seen the preacher draw the Devil out the throats of backsliding men, but
until I'd been to Bunia, I'd never seen that kind of evil. When I did, I stared
into it long and hard, took it inside and made it part of me, and its impression
has since shaped my life.
I haven't stopped looking. In Congo, the killing continues today, a
slow-turning mill of death and misery controlled by outsiders, fueled by greed,
and a global hunger for industrial might. And according to the International
Rescue Committee, an American aid group, it's claimed over five million lives,
more than any conflict since World War II, mainly from war-induced sickness and
hunger when fighting drives families into the bush.
In May 2003, Bunia - capital of the hill-swept Ituri district near the
Ugandan border - was a latter flashpoint in Congo's multi-headed war, a
thrumming organism of rape and pillage propped up by over half a dozen rebel
groups and their shifty government sponsors. The war had begun in 1998 when
Rwanda and Uganda invaded Congo to oust the president, Laurent Kabila, and to
exterminate the tens of thousands of Hutu rebels who'd fled there after
orchestrating Rwanda's genocide four years earlier. At its peak, the war sucked
in seven African armies, who largely financed their stay by siphoning Congo's
wealth of natural resources: timber, gold, diamonds, copper, and coltan, which
is used to make chips in mobile phones and laptop computers.
To control these minerals, Uganda and Rwanda began arming and training local
ethnic militia. In Ituri, it was the Hema and Lendu, who were already engaged in
a bloody land dispute. Automatic weapons and rockets from their new government
sponsors only spiked the carnage.
By May 2003, the Hema-Lendu war had killed over 50,000 people and driven
hundreds of thousands into squalid camps filled with disease. That same year,
Human Rights Watch reported that Uganda funneled $60 million in gold out of
eastern Congo, most of it bound for Switzerland. Rwanda and its proxy force were
earning over a million each month in diamonds.
I'd arrived in Bunia in late
April to cover another massacre in the hills north of town. There, around a
village called Drodro, Lendu militia had butchered as many as one thousand Hema
in less than three hours. (Six months earlier, in another town, the Hema had
murdered eight hundred Lendu, then stuffed their mutilated bodies down the
wells.)
I'd recently quit a magazine job in New York and moved to Nairobi, Kenya to
be a freelance reporter. I'd flown to Bunia with the Ugandan army - who were
based in town and still controlled the region - and covered the Drodro massacre,
then returned the following week to get a more in-depth story. Under a peace
deal brokered by the United Nations, the Ugandans were preparing to withdraw
their seven thousand troops from Congo. Knowing this, the gunboy armies of the
Hema and Lendu were gathering on the edge of town, waiting to fill the vacuum
left by their sponsor. A small UN peacekeeping force of three hundred soldiers
had arrived to replace the Ugandans, yet their mandate didn't allow them to
protect civilians. Once in Bunia, it became clear another massacre would unfold
right there in town.
The UN, trying to broker peace between the warring tribes, invited both
armies into town for talks, yet didn't ask them to disarm. Soon we shared the
streets with Lendu warriors, many of them children, who carried rusty
Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades, and spears whittled to saw teeth. Magic
charms hung from their bandoliers - voodoo they believed would shield them from
bullets. Some dressed in fright masks and battle drag - blond wigs and long
sequined gowns that dragged in the dirt. They tugged on joints and drank beer in
the awning shade. At night they'd go wilding - killing and raping, often
targeting Bunia's Hema residents.
For two weeks, I lay awake in my hotel and counted the gunshots, each night
convinced they were creeping closer to my room. Mornings arrived with fresh
destruction: the taximan hacked with machetes, the teenager hanging in a tree,
the hospital filled with survivors of village attacks who'd stumbled in half
alive (one was a three-year old boy with a necklace gash from a machete). I was
mostly alone and inexperienced and never sure whether to stay or leave. I
stayed, and paranoia soon had its way. I started changing hotels without telling
people. At night, I packed my bags before dark and slept fully clothed. If I had
to escape quickly, I wanted to be ready.
On May 6, the Ugandan army finally readied their last vehicle to roll out of
Bunia and the rest of Ituri. I begged a ride on the Ugandan general's
twin-engine Cessna, knowing fully well the UN couldn't protect me. Before
boarding the plane, I said goodbye to my translator Johnny Ngure, who'd since
become my close friend, and whose father had been killed the previous year in
another militia raid. I was leaving, Johnny was not. When the plane took off and
swung east toward Kampala, I could see the Lendu boys marching toward Bunia.
Little did we know, but the Ugandan commanders had left behind a cache of
weapons as a parting gift to the Lendu: keep the gold safe, and keep it coming.
Two hours after I left, gunboys hit the Catholic parish north of town and
slaughtered the priest. By the next day, the town was awash in blood.
Over the next week, Hema civilians were pulled from their homes and executed,
often in macabre and brutal fashion. Survivors who'd managed to hide watched as
warriors cut out the warm hearts and livers of their dead - both as ceremony and
cold intimidation - and ate them in the roads. Once the Hema militia managed to
push their enemies from town, they simply started murdering Lendu civilians. The
UN peacekeepers, rifles in hand, cowered in their base and watched it unfold,
hamstrung by some invisible rule decided thousands of miles away.
When I returned on May 15 with a group of American missionaries, the town lay
in ruins. Bodies of children rotted in the streets, half eaten by dogs. Shops
were looted, and most of Bunia's population now huddled in camps around the
airport and UN compound, which had been locked until residents crashed the
gates. Johnny was alive and living in the camp under a dirty tarpaulin shelter.
Everything he owned had been stolen in the raid. In total, over five hundred
people had been murdered in town; no telling how many had died in the bush. The
local Red Cross crews did their best to collect the bodies, but sometimes, even
they didn't come back.
In the following months, the UN beefed up its mandate to protect civilians,
and a European Union rapid-reaction force led by the French army managed to
bring a modicum of security to the town. But attacks continued in the bush, and
even after the arrival of thousands more UN peacekeepers, landmark presidential
elections two years later, and a government drive to clean up armed groups,
Ituri and the rest of eastern Congo remains dangerous and unstable.
With China and India's ravenous demand for natural resources only driving up
the value of Congo's gold and copper, the Congolese continue to suffer the curse
of their wealth. The newly-elected government of President Joseph Kabila (his
father was assassinated in 2001) has committed to regulating the mining
industry, but a majority of the minerals still leave the country illegally in
shadowy deals with outside players, and in many cases, directly fuels the
existence of armed groups. Just last week, the BBC reported that Indian and
Pakistani peacekeepers had smuggled weapons to militia in eastern Congo in
exchange for gold, ivory, and drugs. The UN says the practice was isolated, but
still, it goes to prove that in Congo, even the good guys get greedy.
So what can you do? If you happen to be shopping for jewelry, just ask the
dealer where his gold came from. Such pressure worked to slow the export of
blood diamonds from war zones in Sierra Leone. You could also support groups
such as Human Rights Watch, whose hard-biting exposes of international mining
companies have raised enough hell to affect change. Or Doctors Without Borders,
who routinely risk their lives to care for dying children in the bush because
the government can't be bothered.
And sometime this week, please take a minute and join me in remembering Bunia
and all the many people who've died in vain.
www.bryanmealer.com
Bryan
Mealer: Anniversary of a Massacre Foretold - Politics on The Huffington Post
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