Congolese villagers are forming self-defence groups to protect homes and families from Ugandan LRA rebels. LRA rebels have killed 567 people and displaced 115,000 in north-east Democratic Republic of Congo's Oriental province since September, UN refugee agency UNHCR says.
Attacks surged after Ugandan forces spearheaded an anti-LRA offensive in December. In silence broken only by the buzz of insects and the crunch of earth under their plastic sandals, eight men file through the cool night, hunting rifles in hand, scanning the darkness for those who killed their neighbours and burned their homes.
Elsewhere in the areas surrounding the town of Dungu, dozens more like them stalk the forest, mostly farmers and internal refugees armed with locally made guns or bows and arrows.
"This is very necessary for me, first and foremost, for the town, and for the people who are suffering in the bush, who have done nothing and who are dying," said Pascal Kalemba, the bottom half of his boyish face hidden by an airline sleeping mask. Lord's Resistance Army rebel fighters attacked Dungu in September, as efforts to negotiate a peace deal to end their two-decade bush war against the Ugandan government broke down.
"They just walked straight into town. They started to burn houses and kill people," Kalemba said. At the time, not a single Congolese soldier was deployed in the town of 57,000 inhabitants, located near Garamba National Park, the LRA's stronghold since it fled to Congo in 2005.
On December 14, a Ugandan-led multinational force, including Congolese and South Sudanese soldiers, launched an offensive aiming to capture the rebels' reclusive leader Joseph Kony. Instead, the operation splintered the rebels into smaller groups that are now attacking villages, slaughtering civilians, raping women and kidnapping children for use as sex slaves and child soldiers. The UN death toll may be conservative.
New York-based Human Rights Watch says three days of raids alone, starting on Christmas Day, killed at least 600 people. Most were beaten to death with clubs or hacked with machetes.
ARMY "RUNS AWAY": The head of Dungu's self-defence force, former chief Etienne Dalafata, said despite the deployment of over 3,500 government troops to the area, villages must defend themselves. "We've already gone on operations with the army, but when we go into the bush they get scared and run away. They are city soldiers," he said.
Dalafata said his force enjoys the town's support and that militias have sprung up across Congo's northern borderlands. All of this worries Felicien Balani, president of Dungu's local civil society association.
"Our army must make them unnecessary. They find their justification in its ineffectiveness. If this lasts another six months or a year, they'll start looking for better equipment, and we risk a Mai Mai phenomenon," he said. Mai Mai ethnic militias sprang up across eastern Congo in the 1990s during invasions by Rwanda and proxy rebel groups. Like Dalafata's men, the Mai Mai initially said they took up arms to protect their communities. But they became notorious for bloody massacres of civilians, rape, and ritual cannibalism.
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