Congo despairing at thought of return of war

A coup attempt in the capital and a week of clashes over an eastern border city made clear the precariousness of Congo's peace, scaring its desperate people that they could be plunged back into Africa's deadliest war.

They already saw 3.3 million countrymen die in the 1998-2002 war, which drew in armies from five neighboring nations. Tens of thousands took to the streets nationwide to vent their anger over the new threat.

"What will happen next? We are on our way to chaos," an opposition politician, Valentin Mubake Nombi, lamented this week in Congo's capital, Kinshasa, which saw the bloodiest of the rioting that erupted with the June 2 fall of Bukavu to renegade former rebels.

Congolese denounced the postwar power-sharing government and burned, stoned and looted bases of the 10,800 U.N. peacekeepers in Congo. The mobs blamed both for Bukavu's takeover by two former rebel commanders and their supporters.

At the end of the week, the brittle transition government led by President Joseph Kabila seemed to have survived the biggest threat in its 14 months, after driving the last renegades from Bukavu on Wednesday and crushing a coup attempt by presidential guards in Kinshasa on Friday.

Kabila's administration dismissed opposition allegations that it had exaggerated or even faked the coup attempt as an excuse to clamp down ahead of next year's elections.

Protests by the powerless

Nevertheless it was evident the tensions that touched off the war remain severe, two years after the war ended.

The violent protests across the country after Bukavu's capture were the desperation and anger of the powerless -- knowing through experience what faces them if Congo's war revives, a longtime humanitarian official said.

"Another victim of this war was people's sense of hope, sense of control over their lives," said Michael Despines, an International Rescue Committee regional director who spent six years in Congo during and after the war. "That was starting to come back."

The fighting over Bukavu showed people how delicate the situation is, Despines said.

"It unleashed this frustration and rage in the population over the lack of control of their lives," he said. "They can't provide ... they can't protect their women or children."

The countryside starved. In rebel territory, fighters snatched crops and drove families from fields. It was there, in the east, where the bulk of the 3.3 million deaths took place -- many dying of famine or in epidemics from diseases that normally are easily curable.

"Jesus Christ says in the last days, there will be war, there will be suffering," a singer, Simons Mokonkole, sang in one isolated front-line village, Kabinda, at the height of the war. "That's where we are now."

That was in 2001, when an abortive truce brought families straggling out of the bush with stunted children -- a 5-year-old girl weighing 17 pounds, an 11-year-old girl weighing 27 pounds.

Deeper in the bush were those worse off, villagers and aid workers reported: "les nus" -- villages of the naked, where people hid in shame because their clothes had rotted off.

"You had no riches in your own country, only cows, so you came to take ours," Mokonkole sang during the 2001 truce.

Congo's tragedy began with Rwanda's -- in 1994, when a then ethnic Hutu-dominated government massacred more than a half million minority Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

Congo's leaders did nothing when Rwandan Hutu involved in the genocide fled into Congo, setting up bases for attacks on Rwanda after Tutsi-led forces drove them from power.

Seeking to end the threat, Rwanda's army invaded eastern Congo in 1996, and again in 1998, backing Congolese rebels.

The renegade Congolese Tutsi commanders were wartime members of the Rwanda-backed rebel group. But Rwanda denied any involvement in the latest Bukavu fighting, and U.N. officials said they saw no sign of Rwandan troops there.

Uganda joined Rwanda in the 1998 offensive, with both pouring in thousands of soldiers in a bid to topple Congo's government that grew into Africa's "first world war."

Congo's southern neighbors -- Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia -- sent troops to support the government.

The government and its allies held on to the capital, in western Congo, and 40 percent of the nation. Their foes controlled the rest, running de facto fiefdoms in the resource-rich east and northeast.

The split severed the Congo River and other trade routes. Cut off from the rest of the country, Kinshasa went hungry. Dog-meat shacks did sellout business after each morning roundup from yards.

But

worse off, villagers and aid workers reported: "les nus" -- villages of the naked, where people hid in shame because their clothes had rotted off.

Congo's division stalemated. The country's wealth -- gold, diamonds, copper and other minerals -- gave the foreign combatants incentive to stay.

Kabinda had the misfortune of lying between Rwandan-backed rebels and government and Zimbabwean forces holding the diamond town of Mbuji-Mayi.

"You had no riches in your own country, only cows, so you came to take ours," Mokonkole sang during the 2001 truce.