- TCHOMIA, Congo -- As though
time had turned back at least a century, tribal raiders are swooping on
the villages of eastern Congo and carrying off their human booty to slave
camps where order is enforced with beatings and amputations.
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- They come in the cool hours before dawn, their presence
announced by the clanging of a cow bell that echoes through the hillside
hamlets of the Hema tribe, overlooking Lake Albert in Congo's Ituri
district.
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- Armed with machetes and machineguns, the raiders scythe
through the rows of huts, torching their thatched roofs.
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- Mothers clutching their screaming children run through
the flames into the arms of their captors, members of a militia from the
rival Lendu tribe.
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- The fat and the elderly, those unsuited for work on the
Lendu farms or in the gold and mineral mines they illegally occupy, are
hacked to death.
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- The chase is then on for those that manage to escape
the dragnet and flee into the bush.
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- Clutching two of his five children, Pierre Njango fled
the village of Nyanabu in early February.
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- The flames leaping from the village illuminated the sky
behind him and the air was filled with screams.
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- "My wife was running behind us," he said.
"I
heard her cry out and trip. She had been hit in the leg with a bullet.
I managed to get all the children to hide behind a rock but before I could
get back the Lendus had caught up with her. They saw she was wounded and
killed her with machetes."
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- For an hour Mr Njango's family hid behind the rock as
the militiamen prowled the countryside in search of their quarry.
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- Then his daughter, Antoinette, sneezed and their position
was given away.
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- Along with about 200 other survivors, the family was
taken to a militia camp and set to work in the fields, ferrying crops to
boats anchored on the lake.
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- "We were tied together," Mr Njango said.
"It
was very hot and we were weak as we had no food. But if any of us slipped,
they would beat us with rubber whips. Some who tried to escape were either
taken away and killed or their hands were chopped off."
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- Such scenes were once a regular sight in Congo. In the
19th century Belgium's King Leopold II turned the country into a vast slave
colony to plunder its abundant rubber resources.
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- His overseers enforced their brutal regime with the
chicotte,
a rubber whip used to discipline recalcitrant slaves.
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- Tens of thousands had their hands amputated for trying
to flee.
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- It has been over a century since Tippu Tip, the infamous
Arab slave merchant who used to provide porters for the expeditions of
the explorer and Telegraph reporter, Henry Morton Stanley, raided the
shores
of Lake Albert for slaves.
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- Some of the most horrific massacres of Congo's civil
war, which has claimed over three million lives through starvation, disease
and slaughter since 1998, have taken place in this mineral rich
region.
-
- But, until January, slave raids were unheard of. No one
knows how many people have been seized by the slavers.
-
- The United Nations peacekeeping force MONUC recently
managed to secure the release of 3,000 slaves after threatening military
action against the militiamen holding them.
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- Up to 100,000 people have fled in terror to overcrowded
refugee camps like the one in Tchomia, a hot, dusty trading town on the
shores of Lake Albert. Mr Njango and his children are among the 12,000
displaced in the camp.
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- He fled the slave drivers after bribing one of the
overseers
to smuggle him on to a boat.
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- Conditions are terrible. Aid agencies have not been able
to reach most of the camps because the militias are marauding through the
countryside. Up to 50 children are dying every day as disease sweeps
through
the camp.
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- Lying on the ground, Mr Njango's daughter Antoinette
moans softly in delirium. Afflicted by both meningitis and malaria, she
will almost certainly be dead by the end of the week.
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- A little further down the fetid alleyway dividing the
line of shelters in Tchomia, Francoise Ndroza is engaged in a similar
battle
to save the life of her four-month-old son Dieu, ill with acute diarrhoea.
She too managed to escape the camp, where she was used as a sex slave -
repeatedly raped by her captors on a daily basis.
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- When she tried to resist they drove a large pestle into
her wrist, shattering the bones.
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- Leopold's regime was ended by outrage in Britain and
America. Authors such as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, whose novel Heart
of Darkness was a fictional account of the horrors of Leopold's Congo,
joined the campaign. This time the world has offered little condemnation
of the foreign businessmen and local militiamen whose greed to exploit
Congo's natural wealth has fuelled a war more deadly than any other since
1945.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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