The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
“Some of the militias are blocking the refugees from crossing the lake, so there is still a lot of people displaced in the villages across the lake,” said Joyce Munyonyo-Mbithi of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).
Uganda claims to host close to 1.4 million refugees from around the region. Most come from South Sudan where a civil war has been raging for the last four years, but the quarter of a million Congolese are swelling in number.
– Savage attacks –
Over 45,000 people have arrived in Uganda this year, escaping Ituri as well as other clashes further south, in the chronically restive North Kivu.
But safety is relative: in just three days this month diarrhoea killed 26 people in a single Ugandan camp and there are fears of a cholera outbreak to come.
In the squalid haven of Kagoma Transit Centre, a two-hour drive from the lake, refugees from Ituri described villages burned, children hacked to death with machetes, people shot with arrows and women raped.
Survivors could describe the savagery, but not explain it. Who exactly the armed men were, what they wanted or why they rampaged through their villages was a mystery.
One militia arrived dressed as a football team and when villagers went to greet them they opened fire, said Imani Prisca, a 19-year-old mother of three.
“They started shooting and burning our houses.”
Marie Eduzi, a 61-year-old widow and mother of 11 was separated from her children as desperate civilians squeezed into rickety boats on the Congo shore.
For her, this latest violence is the last straw. After the attack on her village by what she described as a Lendu militia she’s had enough. “I never want to go back,” she said.
