Democratic Republic of Congo
This week I joined United Nations forces in the Congo for an offensive against rebel militias. ‘We’re the only ones who want to fight,’ said the South African colonel, cussing the other blue helmet contingents. ‘They’re too scared to go forwards and I’m tired of it.’ Pakistanis bombarding the opposite hillside with mortars wanted to leave the dirty work to the Congolese government forces. ‘Good shot!’ exclaimed the Pakistani major each time a mud hut got blown to bits a mile off. An Indian helicopter gunship circled at altitude, too high to fire its rockets. ‘Nobody wants to die for the Congolese,’ an Indian told me later. Congolese troops, stoned on huge quantities of dope and maize beer, set off from our position. Within an hour, small arms fire was crackling across the ridge. We were able to determine the government army’s advance by fires billowing up from the militia-occupied villages. The soldiers were burning every house — and I had to remind myself that this is an operation the United Nations says is intended to bring security to civilians so that they can vote in democratic elections.
I was boiling hot in my helmet and flak jacket as we set off with the South Africans on foot. An Afrikaner officer said, ‘We’re supposed to be here to protect civilians. We can’t do that by sitting here.’ He predicted that we’d be ambushed among the banana groves, huts and wooded valleys. I was scared, thrilled and horrified all at the same time. When we made it to the opposite hillside, huge orange flames were leaping skywards into a spectacular tropical sunset. As we toiled up the slope and emerged from a thicket of trees full of brightly coloured birds, we came under a hail of AK-47 fire.
I was breathing so hard with sweat streaming into my eyes that it took a few seconds for me to realise we were in an ambush. I looked up on to the ridge above us and saw several figures in the long grass firing at us. Few of the South Africans bothered to take cover, but responded with bursts from a belt-fed machine gun, their rifles and a grenade launcher. The battalion’s chaplain, who had spurned helmet and flak, strode among his soldiers quietly chatting to them in Afrikaans. James trotted about happily filming the action, disregarding the officers’ pleas for him to lie flat. Bullets whizzed through the grass between us. ‘Save your ammunition,’ ordered the colonel, who borrowed my phone and asked the Pakistanis for a mortar strike. We heard the launches and the yell went up, ‘Incoming!’ — followed by three whopping bangs close by. After a pause, our attackers were up and at it again. ‘And again, please,’ asked the colonel nonchalantly. Womp, womp, fadoom went the mortar bombs. Still the rebels kept up their steady fire. Now irritated, the South Africans launched a withering fusillade and began advancing across the hill. Finally, we saw figures scurrying over the hill.
At the ridge summit we met the Congolese army. They were jubilant, but there were wounded being carried up the hill. A Congolese officer claimed that the UN mortars had overshot the militias and cut up his own men. The soldiers then led us down a track on the other side of the hill between houses where we saw all the signs of civilian life that had been abandoned only hours before. If a house was still intact, the Congolese set light to its thatch on the argument that it might shelter militias. Nobody wanted to risk venturing inside to check. The platoon of blue helmets were powerless to stop the Congolese from laying waste the villages before our very eyes. But at least they were here, on the ground risking their necks to save any civilians who might be left, and not parked on a hill a mile away with the rest of the UN.
Soon we came to pools of blood and a pile of militia dead — three barefoot youths who looked like brothers. One had his guts hanging out. The South Africans reckoned these had been our attackers, caught between us and the mortars and the Congolese troops. I wondered if they were rapacious rebels, or if they had lived here on this hillside and wanted to fight only to protect their families and their farms from invaders.
By now it was getting dark, so we toiled back to camp with mortar-launched illumination rounds helping us pick our way through the densely wooded valley bottom. On the way we encountered a dead man on our path, an army soldier being dragged along by his comrades. It was a grisly and sad end to the day. If people want a robust United Nations to deliver peace to the world they have to accept this means blue helmets getting involved in the dirty realities of conflict, up close and not from a distance.
Aidan Hartley’s Congo film will be shown as part of Channel 4’s Unreported World series.
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