KIVUYE, Congo — On the first market day after the militia retreated, as the midday sun broke through the mist, hundreds of villagers gathered on a grassy hillside.
Vendors sold fresh cabbage, corn and potatoes without fear of being robbed. Women bought pink dresses and orange cloth without fear of being raped. Children kicked a tattered ball made of twine without fear of being dragged away and forced to carry a gun.
As dusk fell, no one rushed home.
But Bernard Kamanzi was nervous. The top government official here, he knew such bursts of freedom always vanished quickly. And he knew something the villagers didn’t know: The Congolese soldiers who had been fighting the militias and protecting the village had withdrawn that morning.
“The militias could come back at any moment,” he said. “That’s the fear we have.”
The village in eastern Congo lies at the epicenter of one of Africa’s most brutal and longest-running wars. It is both military base and refugee camp, both killing field and sanctuary, a place woven from chaos and resilience. Civilians trapped in relentless violence struggle to live. Death arrives in many forms — guns, machetes, disease and hunger.
It is a war that has claimed an estimated 5 million lives, many from starvation, disease and other conflict-related causes, since 1998 — more casualties than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined, and more than any conflict since World War II. It is a war that the world’s largest and most expensive U.N. peacekeeping mission has failed to quell. The peacekeepers, heavily financed by Washington, are now engaged in
their most ambitious effort in years to end the fighting.
And yet the war remains invisible to most outsiders, who have grown weary of the unending cycle of violence.
Today, relief groups have trouble raising money to help Congo as more publicized upheavals in Syria, South Sudan and elsewhere grab the world’s attention.
It's one reason I feel pretty strongly about helping the Afghans and Iraqi's who helped us in the wars.
