The World’s Worst War
LAST month, as I was driving down a backbreaking road between Goma, a provincial capital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kibumba, a little market town about 20 miles away, I came upon the body of a Congolese soldier. He was on his back, half hidden in the bushes, his legs crumpled beneath him, his fly-covered face looking up at the sun.
Some are impossible to forget, like Anna Mburano, an 80-year-old woman
who was gang-raped a few years ago and screamed out to the teenage
assailants on top of her: “Grandsons! Get off me!”
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LAST month, as I was driving down a backbreaking road between Goma, a provincial capital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kibumba, a little market town about 20 miles away, I came upon the body of a Congolese soldier. He was on his back, half hidden in the bushes, his legs crumpled beneath him, his fly-covered face looking up at the sun.
The strangest thing was, four years ago, almost to the day, I saw a
corpse of a Congolese soldier in that exact same spot. He had been
killed and left to rot just as his comrade would be four years later, in
the vain attempt to stop a rebel force from marching down the road from
Kibumba to Goma. The circumstances were nearly identical: a group of
Tutsi-led rebels, widely believed to be backed by Rwanda, eviscerating a feckless, alcoholic government army that didn’t even bother to scoop up its dead.
Sadly, this is what I’ve come to expect from Congo: a doomed sense of
déjà vu. I’ve crisscrossed this continent-size country from east to
west, in puddle jumpers, jeeps and leaky canoes. I’ve sat down with the
accidental president, Joseph Kabila,
a former taxi driver who suddenly found himself in power at age 29
after his father was shot in the head. I’ve tracked down a warlord who
lived on top of a mountain, in an old Belgian farmhouse that smelled
like wet wool, and militia commanders who marched into battle as naked
as the day they were born and slicked with oil — to protect themselves
from bullets, of course. And each time I come back, no matter where I
go, I meet a whole new set of thoroughly traumatized people.
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