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Tribal Slave Raids Bring New Wave Of Terror To Congo

By Adrian Blomfield
 

The Telegraph - UK
March 8, 2005

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.

 

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.

 

Armed with machetes and machineguns, the raiders scythe through the rows of huts, torching their thatched roofs.

 

Mothers clutching their screaming children run through the flames into the arms of their captors, members of a militia from the rival Lendu tribe.

 

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.

 

The chase is then on for those that manage to escape the dragnet and flee into the bush.

 

Clutching two of his five children, Pierre Njango fled the village of Nyanabu in early February.

 

The flames leaping from the village illuminated the sky behind him and the air was filled with screams.

 

"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."

 

For an hour Mr Njango's family hid behind the rock as the militiamen prowled the countryside in search of their quarry.

 

Then his daughter, Antoinette, sneezed and their position was given away.

 

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.

 

"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."

 

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.

 

His overseers enforced their brutal regime with the chicotte, a rubber whip used to discipline recalcitrant slaves.

 

Tens of thousands had their hands amputated for trying to flee.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

He fled the slave drivers after bribing one of the overseers to smuggle him on to a boat.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

When she tried to resist they drove a large pestle into her wrist, shattering the bones.

 

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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