BUNIA (Congo): The Russian pilot guides the 30-year-old Antonov down on a dirt airstrip, the 120 Congolese squatting in its cargo hold cheer and clap.
The applause isn’t only because the venerable aircraft had lumbered safely through the skies from their hometown of Bunia to a forest settlement nearby. They are expressing relief at fleeing a war that has led to massacres and homelessness and made Bunia a byword for militia bloodlust.
Ironically the aircraft, and others like it that ply the skies of the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), are key players in an informal economy of plunder that analysts blame for stoking the violence in the first place.
Residents say hundreds of people have been killed and thousands have been uprooted by a spasm of bloodletting this month between militias linked to the Hema and Lendu tribes, old rivals with a history of land disputes stretching back decades.
Wounded survivors with gashed faces and necks say ethnicity is the immediate reason they were attacked — their assailants, mainly teenagers high on traditional brews made from plants and animal parts, slashed them with machetes because they were from the “wrong” tribe.
Residents speak of worse atrocities — victims dismembered and their hearts ripped out. There is talk of cannibalism, a practice recorded elsewhere in eastern DRC in recent months.
JOCKEYING FOR WEALTH: But the militia leaders deploying the youths have links to Congolese businessmen who are in turn backed by neighbouring countries with their eyes on the mineral wealth of Bunia and the surrounding Ituri region, analysts and residents say.
“I think the hatred here is fuelled by political ambition. I don’t think it is fuelled by ethnic feeling,” a UN official said.
Another UN official, Michel Noureddine Kassa, head coordinator of UN humanitarian work in the DRC, said: “Sometimes you see planes landing in Bunia and people bringing a suitcase (to the plane) and that plane going away without any registration. Nowhere is it written that plane came and left, but it is part of this conflict and this crisis in Ituri.”
Congo has long been a treasure trove of gold, timber, diamonds and other minerals and reports by UN experts have found that it is this wealth that helped draw in the armies of neighbouring states when Congo’s many-sided war began in 1998.
That is especially true of Ituri’s corner of the conflict, where Uganda has been the main foreign military force and where its friend-turned-enemy Rwanda is said by human rights groups to be competing hard to gain a foothold by building its own links to militias.
The discovery of commercial quantities of oil in Uganda and talk of similar deposits just across the border in eastern Congo has helped spur the rush for influence among Congolese seeking to arbitrate the entry of foreign players into a region far from prying eyes of the capital Kinshasa, 1,600 kms away.
“Ituri is a small DRC in itself: Here we see the worst signs of the disintegration of the Congolese state. Local officials have not been paid by the government, and certainly not at a decent rate, since the mid-1980s,” said Kassa.
“So here you have the sense of the goal being absolute power. It’s a zero sum game. You sell yourself (to outside parties to gain those ends),” said Kassa.
MILITARY OPTION: Kassa sees the main players as foreign companies and “corrupt nationals who see their own interest first, to the point of involvement in the arms trade and using the military option to secure their own interests”.
Uganda and Rwanda both deny stirring violence. Uganda says its interest lies in preventing Ituri descending into Somalia- style anarchy that would allow its own anti-government Ugandan rebels a safe haven from which to attack Kampala.
To underline its sincerity and as part of an overall DRC peace effort, Uganda completed a pullout of its own troops from Ituri earlier this month. But the withdrawal created a security vacuum that was immediately filled by the local militias, who joined the battle to dominate Bunia.
The main force in Bunia now is a Hema militia that local observers believe is backed by Rwanda. Rwanda denies any role in the fighting.
But UN sources say both Rwanda and Uganda have military intelligence officers in the region competing for influence. UN officials trying to arbitrate peace say diplomatically that they regularly speak to any and all outside parties with influence on the combatants.
Colonel Daniel Vollot, commander of UN peacekeeping troops in Bunia, says the militias are very keen to wrest control of its airport from the UN troops occupying it to use it exclusively for their own purposes.
France is willing to send troops as part of a multinational effort to stabilise Bunia. But military might alone may not be enough to curb the political and business forces behind the violence, analysts say.
“We could come in and kill all the young militiamen. That wouldn’t be difficult at all,” a French military source said. “But what would it solve?”—Reuters