A new wave of displaced in Congo

Julien Paluku, the Governor of D. R. Congo’s North Kivu province, has been touring the Masisi region yesterday and today, to reassure local populations on the security of their towns. Yesterday in Kuraba and Mushaki, today in Kitshanga, he told people “I would like to fight so that everyone can return home and get back to school”. That fight was brought with a strong contingent of Congolese army, including a truck full of commandos, and heavily armed police, protecting the governor and his delegation.

But whilst Mr. Paluku addressed a large crowd in Kitshanga today, several hours west of Goma, thousands were fleeing the area around Kibumba on the road leading north from Goma towards Rutshuru. Those fleeing Kibumba told me that at around nine o’clock the previous evening, the CNDP had arrived in their town. “They started shooting around midnight” said eighteen year old Bahat Buguru, describing the moment the clashes with the Congolese army started. At seven the following morning, Mr. Buguru and his family started the long walk towards Goma, arriving at Kibati on the provincial capital’s outskirts, eight hours later. “It’s serious”, he says.

By six o’clock this evening, the local administration had registered some six hundred families at a small school in Kibati, and said that they still had many more to log. As dusk fell, people were still arriving in Kibati, with many more still on the road from Kabumba. In the dark on the road to Goma, a trickle of people were headed for the Rwandan border.

The ceasefire between the FARDC and army defectors is due to expire tomorrow, but these clashes appear to have already broken that. Defectors have formed under the banner of the M23 movement, a nod to the date of the 2009 agreement between the government and the CNDP; the infamous Bosco Ntaganda is no longer their head.

In the meantime, a new wave of displaced Congolese will add themselves to over 1.4 million in the Kivus, and some 2 million country-wide.

The Kibumba displaced in Kibati were appealing for help - they have no food, and said that they can’t get to anywhere to obtain it. As gunshots were heard in Goma tonight, the conflict that displaced them sounds far from over.

Congolese Refugees in Rwanda

A week ago, this camp was all but empty. A transit centre for Rwandans returning from years of being refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo, around 450 Rwandans passed through here each month. But since April 28th, the Nkamira transit camp, 15km from Rwanda’s border town of Gisenyi, is now overflowing with more than 5000 Congolese refugees. With clashes between the Congolese army and mutinying soldiers, the UN estimates that around 20,000 people have been displaced.

Straton Kamanzi, the manager of the centre nestled into Rwanda’s hills, said this morning that “there is not enough space for everyone”, as tents and make-shift shelters are assembled on the grass outside his office. “On Tuesday, we expected 5000 refugees would arrive here. But we’ve already passed that, and we could have a lot more.” For those that arrived the previous evening, room could not be found, and so they slept outside in the bitterly cold night. “We hope that we’ll have shelter for them tonight, but for those that arrive today, I don’t think so.”

The refugees here all tell tales of war, of attacks going on around their villages in Massisi district of Congo’s restive North Kivu province. News reports are focusing on the whereabouts of Bosco Ntaganda, a general in the Congolese army indicted by the International Criminal Court. He is held responsible for the defecting soldiers, and is now wanted by the Congolese state as well as the ICC; but he denies any involvement in the mutiny.

Everyone in the camp knows his name, but they are far from unanimous on his involvement in the clashes that have forced them from their homes. Many were fleeing due to looting and lawlessness that has erupted since the conflict.

But now, their more pressing needs are shelter. The Rwandan authorities here, as well as UNHCR, are erecting structures as fast they can, but this is not a refugee camp, and if the problems of North Kivu continue, a more permanent solution will need to be found for the swelling numbers of Congolese.

LRA Displaced

A young boy stands with a panga, used for chopping small trees for firewood and making homes, in the Nanzawa camp for internally displaced persons on the outskirts of Dungu in D. R. Congo’s Orientale Province.

Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, led by Joseph Kony, have been attacking civilian populations in Haut and Bas Uélé districts since 2008, resulting in the displacement of over 300,000 people, according to an international NGO working in the region.

Fleeing Drought

Hassan Ali has a canteen of water slung over one shoulder, in his right hand he holds a walking stick, and in his left, a blackened kettle. A scarf is draped over his head to protect him from the midday sun, he stands in thin, cracked flip-flops, and wears a blue, short-sleeved shirt over polo-shirt, with a Somali wrap-around skirt around his waist. This is all he has left.

With the sun beating over-head, he pours a little water from his kettle over his feet to wash them, ablutions before the dhuhr (noon) prayers.

Hassan is forty-two years old, and fifteen days ago he left his home in Dinsour, Somalia, his livelihood destroyed by the drought that has ravaged Somalia. Two kilometres behind him stands the Somali-Kenyan border, and ahead of him lies the Dadaab refugee complex - the largest refugee camp in the world.

This is where Hassan and his five compatriots are heading. Hassan’s wife and children left Dinsour for Dadaab several weeks previously, whilst he stayed on to try and struggle through the drought, to save his home and land. Now he is walking to join them, a small family amongst 380,000 refugees.

When he arrives, Hassan will register with the camp authorities, and try to locate his family. The camp is already several times over capacity, and it can take days to register, and weeks to receive a refugee—and therefore ration—card.

But before he can do that, Hassan has over one hundred kilometres across the hot sands ahead of him, with little respite. The few, small villages en-route are themselves suffering from the drought, and have already seen so many refugees heading to Dadaab.

Dadaab & Drought

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The bus bounded over pot-holed roads, heading north-east from Nairobi into the arid scrubland towards the Somali border. We were seven, crammed into the back seat of this behemoth, thrown upwards out of our seats on some of the nastier bumps, my head once hitting the roof.

Past Garissa, all that lay ahead of us was the Somali border—an unruly frontier—and Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp.

The three camps that comprise the Dadaab refugee complex, and which are already over-capacity, have swelled in recent months, their numbers growing due to the drought (and subsequent famine) ravaging Somalia.

I began working on the drought back in May, covering the drought-displaced in Mogadishu. Conditions were terrible back then, and people were arriving into the war-torn capital in a deplorable state. I had never seen malnutrition this bad.

This did not prepare me, however, for what I would encounter in Dadaab. The size of the place is overwhelming; the sheer number of people living here, as refugees from a war-torn country, many for over a decade. The camps are overwhelmed by the number of people arriving, unable to process that many (over 1000) people each day. And in the hospitals, the severity of the malnutrition was unlike anything I had encountered, neither in eastern Sudan, South Sudan nor Mogadishu.

When I was in Mogadishu, it seemed like no-one was covering the drought, it took over a month for the pictures to appear on the Guardian website. Now, half of the Juba independence press corps. The drought is all over the international news, and rightly so. Through a proper response, political will and, admittedly, with cooperation from al-Shebab, much of this could have been prevented.

» For more coverage of the drought in the Horn of Africa, see my portfolio