Killings in Congo’s north-east spark fears of a return to war

AS HE SLIPPED out of consciousness, Batsi Lokana watched the militiamen who had attacked him slice off his mother’s head. When he came to, her body was gone. “Either they ate her, or they threw her into the river,” he surmises from his hospital bed in Bunia, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri province. Given Ituri’s history of gore, it is not a far-fetched conclusion. The past two decades have seen civil war, mass killings, systematic gang-rape and a vile scramble for loot. For some militias, cannibalism is just another way to terrify one’s enemies.

Last month saw a reprise of the violence as Ituri’s cattle-herding Hema and seed-sowing Lendu ethnic groups again turned on each other. Armed men emptied villages, burned down houses, hacked bits off their occupants and ripped the fetus out of at least one woman. A mass grave found in the village of Tche contained 161 bodies, babies and small children among them.