DR CONGO: Automatic weapon fire erupted, and Captain Miraj, a Bangladeshi peacekeeper, started shouting for everyone to flee.
Around 20 local Red Cross workers had gathered in Dhedja, a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s troubled northeastern region.
They had come to assist in the burying of bodies that had been rotting for three weeks following a massacre – and the killers had now returned.
The panicked aid workers fled across fields and burned-out houses, cowering behind a wall as UN MONUSCO peacekeepers fired random bursts into the high grass.
UN armoured vehicles advanced to assist the terrified group, coming under fire as they did so.
Silence returned after a 20-minute exchange of gunshots. No one was injured, and no one went missing.
The bloodshed in Ituri province’s hillside villages has increased in the last two years, fueled by a political-religious sect known as CODECO.
The Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO) conceals a bitter ethnic feud between the Lendu, whom the group claims to represent, and the Hema.
Fighting erupted between the two communities between 1999 and 2003, claiming tens of thousands of lives before being put down by Artemis, a European Union peacekeeping force.
The emergence of CODECO was blamed for the resumption of violence in 2017.
CODECO has increased attacks in the Djugu area, which borders Lake Albert and Uganda to the east, since October.
According to the Kivu Security Tracker, at least 82 people were killed in the last ten days of November (KST).
Devastation
The UN vehicles stopped over at a devastated camp for displaced people at Drodro.
Less than a month ago, the camp was home to 16,000 people. It was then attacked by militiamen on November 21, who torched shacks and shelters and killed 26 people.
Today, a few women and young children forage through the wreckage in search of food or salvageable materials, as flocks of crows whirl and caw overhead.
A child clutched a school exercise book on whose cover was written, in French: “Time for class!” — a sad irony, given that the camp’s schools have been closed since the attack, as is a hospital supported by the French medical charity MSF.
The convoy reached a UN base on the flanks of Mount Rhoo, a peak 2,000 metres (6,500 feet) high.
Makeshift shelters, devised from plastic sheets and branches, cover some 20 hectares (50 acres) around the base, where desperate people have fled violence.
‘Waiting for death’
“The area is completely hemmed in,” said Audrey Riviere, the local coordinator for the French NGO Action Contre la Faim (Action against Hunger).
One of the few humanitarian workers there, Riviere had only been able to get to Rhoo by helicopter.
“There’s less than three square metres (33 square feet) per person,” she said. “People here lack everything — water, food, places where they can go to the toilet.”
At least three displaced people have been killed in the past two weeks as they ventured out of the camp to forage in nearby fields or fetch water.
“In spite of the risks, we have to leave the camp to look for food, but there’s no safety,” said Constant Ngaz, a trader. “At Rhoo, people are just waiting for death.”
The World Food Programme (WFP) managed to get the first trucks to Rhoo on Monday. Last week, a truck driver seeking to deliver buckets and soap to Rhoo told AFP he had been extorted at CODECO checkpoints.