One of the reasons I chose to come to the Congo is that for the past several weeks in Rwanda, I have been hearing rumors on the streets that the war in Congo will get bad again and very soon. I am in the east of the DRC in a city called Goma in a province named North Kivu, which has not experienced prolonged peace since 1994, when the consequences of the Rwandan genocide first spread across the region, exacerbating tensions everywhere.

The singular reason people think the war here will escalate again is because the incidence of rape is soaring.

In Congo this is like the rustling of leaves before a storm, part of the nightmare theater of the absurd the people here have suffered before. Rape here is so common that journalists don’t report on it, generally dismissing it as part of the problematic culture of the region. No newspaper stories but Doctors Without Borders chronicled a doubling in the amount of rapes last month.

The streets of Goma are tense and dangerous. Two nights ago six people were murdered and the following morning thirty-five rebels were killed. Helicopter gun ships and aged Russian cargo planes fill the skies.

Reliable information is a rare commodity. Within eighty miles there are hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in make-shift camps, multiple vicious armies and militias, starvation in the jungles, child soldiers, nearly twenty thousand UN personnel—the only “blue helmets” in the world authorized to use force—and yet there are only a handful of journalists, most of whom are transient, here and gone before they can know enough to make an impact.

I’m supposed to be headed to a region that has not received food for six weeks because it was deprived of aid until the battle lines moved. The human calamity is anticipated to be the same or worse as the recent famine in Niger… I’ll be sure to send pictures.

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Andrew McGregor is a contributing Africa reporter. This is the first in a series of notebook entries from Congo.

Tags: congo, rape, united nations