- "Women are often abducted as sex slaves. Those caught
trying to escape, especially from Jerome's soldiers, face a brutal execution
known as "the slow death". Over four days their fingers and toes
are cut off, the skin is ripped from their arms and legs and finally they
are disembowelled."
-
- The Agony Of A Traumatised Nation
Heard In The Cries Of A Beaten Child
-
- The Telegraph - UK
1-2-4
-
- The vast, mutilated African state of Congo is enjoying
a ceasefire but butchery and theft continue apace while the the West remains
inactive reports Adrian Blomfield in Aru
-
- Nine-year-old Bahati lies on the ground whimpering, a
urine stain slowly darkening the front of his baggy camouflage trousers.
Two boys, perhaps three or four years older and also dressed in military
uniform, stand over his body clutching bamboo canes in their hands.
-
- They look across at "General Jerome", a former
traffic warden who now heads the Armed Forces of Congolese Patriots, or
FAPC, one of half a dozen militia groups terrorising Ituri district in
north-eastern Congo.
-
- He nods. One boy brings down his cane, then the other.
Their bodies heave in exertion, sweat trickling down their brows as they
build up a rhythm. A low, muffled animal howl fills the air. Monkeys tied
to nearby trees shriek and chatter at the sound. An olive baboon named
Rambo manically hurls himself from branch to branch.
-
- Jonathan, the general's six-month-old pet chimpanzee,
covers his eyes with gnarled hands as he squats nearby.
-
- The eighth blow splits open the skin on Bahati's bared
back, but still they keep on going until his moans fall silent and he rolls
on to his side, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head flung back.
-
- Jerome nods again. "That will teach you not to discharge
your weapon in barracks," he tells the child, a bloody rag doll lying
barely conscious at his feet. More boy soldiers gather around Bahati. Many
are laughing.
-
- They have learned another lesson in violence and brutality,
something that will stand them in good stead the next time Jerome orders
them to cut the throats of women and rape their daughters.
-
- Congo's five-year war officially ended in July when the
main rebel factions joined a transitional government headed by 32-year-old
President Joseph Kabila.
-
- That is cause for measured hope, though not yet for optimism.
Jerome's FAPC is an illustration of the myriad obstacles facing Congo,
an entity in little more than name, over the next few years.
-
- The future of this vast land is a matter of the greatest
importance for the future of Africa.
-
- The war has spread instability, greed and death across
a huge central swathe of the continent from east to west, sucking in and
destabilising avaricious neighbours and opening the way for an army of
organised criminal gangs and carpetbaggers from around the world.
-
- Having finished Bahati's punishment, the general sped
off to the airstrip where his men had taken two Ukrainian pilots hostage
in retaliation for the hijacking of a plane ferrying his senior officers
and weaponry donated by Uganda.
-
- Uganda, along with a former ally, Rwanda, invaded Congo
in 1998.
-
- Now, seeking to expand its hold on Ituri's gold and mineral
resources, it is the driving force behind the FAPC and a militia of cannibalistic
Lendu tribesmen.
-
- Stealing the idea from Hitler's "Convict Army",
responsible for some of the worst atrocities on the Eastern Front, Uganda
fills the FAPC with criminals from the prison in Aru, where Jerome has
made his headquarters. Many were already used to raping and killing; they
massacred more than 1,000 suspected "witches" in 2001.
-
- Rwanda has backed, trained and funded the Lendu's bitter
foes: militia men from the Hema tribe.
-
- The warring tribes, their hatred for each other fanned
by Rwanda and Uganda, have turned Ituri into a crucible of misery. They
have killed perhaps 100,000 people. At least 500,000 more have fled their
murderous onslaught.
-
- Over the past five years, a demographic study by the
International Rescue Committee found, between three million and 4.7 million
people in Congo have died because of the war, mostly from hunger and disease
thought to be preventable during peace time.
-
- Despite the official end of hostilities, millions more
remain vulnerable.
-
- Agriculture has collapsed and for most Congolese it is
still too dangerous to return to their farms. Armed thugs, supposedly now
incorporated in the new Congolese army, roam the countryside raping and
murdering.
-
- Women are often abducted as sex slaves. Those caught
trying to escape, especially from Jerome's soldiers, face a brutal execution
known as "the slow death". Over four days their fingers and toes
are cut off, the skin is ripped from their arms and legs and finally they
are disembowelled.
-
- It is no longer possible to cross Congo, a country the
size of western Europe, by land. One of Africa's best rail and road systems
in the 1960s now lies in ruins, cutting off millions in isolated villages
and robbing them of any hope of prosperity.
-
- Hospitals lie bare and drugless. The West has promised
£2.75 billion over the next few years to help the Congolese to rebuild
their country.
-
- That will be hard enough. Keeping Congo from sliding
back into all-out war will prove even more difficult.
-
- Congo is a country of 250 tribes, artificially created
by the avaricious King Leopold II of Belgium late in the 19th century.
Millions died at the hands of his brutal overseers, who ransacked the country's
resources to fill their master's pockets.
-
- His brutal regime was ended by widespread outrage in
Britain and America where thousands flocked to weekly demonstrations.
-
- "No external question for at least 30 years has
moved the country so strongly and so vehemently," said the then Foreign
Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.
-
- Yet the West has been almost completely silent this time,
as Congolese politicians and warlords, at least eight African countries
and a host of foreign privateers have bloodily recreated the era of Leopold.
-
- A United Nations peacekeeping mission was sent to Congo.
Authorised to use force only to defend its own installations, it stood
by as massacre after massacre unfolded, sometimes in full view of peacekeepers,
and did not fire a single shot.
-
- In June last year, a few hundred French troops, accompanied
by 70 British personnel, were despatched to Bunia, Ituri's main town -
this time with a more robust mandate.
-
- It restored peace but did not disarm Hema militants in
the town, nor did it venture out to stop the slaughter of civilians just
dozens of miles away, some perpetrated by Jerome's soldiers and his allies.
Then, in September, it pulled out, and violence is slowly returning to
Bunia.
-
- Congo-watchers denounced the mission as window dressing
and accused the West of doing little to tackle the root causes of the war.
-
- Guilt over western inaction during the massacre of a
million Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 meant
that little pressure was being put on President Paul Kagame when he invaded
Congo, saying the perpetrators of his country's bloodbath were lurking
there.
-
- But as Rwandan forces killed some 300,000 Hutu refugees
and Congolese civilians, the West did nothing.
-
- Britain, in the person of the then International Development
Minister, Clare Short, actually increased aid to Rwanda, becoming its biggest
donor. Money was also poured into Uganda, even as both countries stole
with all the zeal of latter-day Leopolds.
-
- Last month it emerged that the UN Security Council suppressed
a chapter from a UN report revealing that Rwanda and Uganda were still
arming militias in Congo. It added that senior members of both governments
were continuing to loot their neighbour.
-
- Britain refuses even to consider sanctions against either
country. Others are getting their slice of the action too. Senior Tanzanian
ministers are said to have armed Burundian rebels who are terrorising the
South Kivu region of Congo.
-
- Russian gangsters, smuggling diamonds out of Congo to
warlords in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, enjoy the protection and
collaboration of at least one member of the Kenyan cabinet The Telegraph
has learned.
-
- Members of President Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe
similarly enjoy the country's spoils. Military intervention in Congo to
stop the Rwandan and Ugandan advance plunged Zimbabwe into economic turmoil,
laying the foundations for his vicious attacks on the country's white-owned
farms and the resulting famine.
-
- Meanwhile the rapists, murderers and war criminals who
sit in many of Mr Kabila's 16 ministries are illegally shipping out diamonds
to terrorists and criminal groups across the world, mostly through Belgium.
North American and European companies are doing the same.
-
- Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, a fictional
account of the horrors of Leopold's Congo, described the exploitation he
witnessed as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the
history of human conflicts".
-
- More than 100 years later, the conscience of governments
inside and outside Africa seems to be less sensitive. Their failure to
impose stricter regulations on the supply of arms to Congo or to be harsher
on the unpleasant regimes gorging themselves on its natural riches is tantamount
to collusion, human rights activists and aid workers say.
-
- "What's the use of Britain, America, Europe telling
Rwanda, 'Oh, stop what you're doing in Congo', and then giving them a bunch
of money even though they don't?" one aid worker based in eastern
Congo asked.
-
- "It's like telling Mussolini to pull out of Ethiopia
but then giving him the money to pay his troops."
-
- Controlling the illegal outflow of Congo's minerals would
cut a lifeline to evil men across the world and would remove the spur for
those seeking to exploit it.
-
- Yet the international community seems reluctant to give
teeth to agreements such as the Kimberley Process that seek to restore
accountability in the murky world of the gems trade.
-
- Back at the Aru airstrip, progress of sorts has been
made. An ex-KGB colonel has negotiated the release of Jerome's men, bearing
the scars of several days of torture. The Russian and the general (and
presumably his Ugandan backers) agree that they will share Ituri's gold
in the future.
-
- A bottle of Black Label whiskey is opened. Jerome hands
a beer to Jonathan the chimpanzee, who glugs enthusiastically at the bottle.
-
- The Ukrainian pilots, now free, get back into their planes.
"Crazy fucking Congolese," one says before turning the key in
the ignition.
-
- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/03
/wcong03.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/03/ixhome.html
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