By Ray Wilkinson

The mass grave at the edge of the airfield into which French troops and African Boy Scouts poured untold numbers of bodies is a flourishing banana grove today. But is it purely my imagination or a trick of the light that makes the green leaves here seem greener and the deep red earth redder than anywhere else?

Further along the rutted highway, amidst the splendor of towering volcanoes, tropical rain forests and hide-outs for the world's last strand of majestic gorillas, the memories and the nightmares which all revolve around death, jostle for attention.

The willowy blond Dutch volunteer, Deborah, toiling for days at the world's most thankless job – trying unsuccessfully to bury an increasing mountain of dead bodies of Rwandan refugees. Corpses stacked like cordwood in the blistering heat as a tractor scratches ineffectually at the unyielding volcanic rock. Another veteran loads bodies onto a truck. One 'dead body' suddenly rises from the pile of other corpses and tries to sit up. In his weakened state, he loses his balance, falls from the vehicle, cracks his skull and dies. The aid worker laughs uncontrollably before fleeing the scene.

At Kibumba camp, where hundreds of thousands of people perch on the jagged edges of old lava fields, other corpses are sewn into cloth or bamboo shrouds and dumped along the main road. A bus, a gift of the Japanese government, crunches over a pile of them, their bones cracking and spitting like lighted sticks in a camp fire. I will never enjoy that sound again, however innocent.

One man of indeterminate age pushes his bicycle slowly towards me, drops quietly to his knees and dies still clinging upright to the handlebars. In a daze, I move him gently to the side of the road.

A pretty girl who somehow has retained her youth, she is in fact beautiful among such ugliness, suckles a baby. A mother with wizened breasts asks her to feed her own child. The young woman refuses. She hasn't enough milk for both, she says.

One must escape from this madness every few hours or it will totally overwhelm you. En route back to Goma town, the nerve centre of an operation trying to save literally hundreds of thousands of lives, an out-of-control truck plows into a group of aid workers who have stopped at the scene of an accident. Two people at my side are killed.

The runaway truck smashes into a nearby field and bodies are hurled from the back of the vehicle. It is another corpse carrier. Only drink will exorcise my demons this night.

Goma is a media circus. Each morning on the terrace of the Hôtel des Grands Lacs, humanitarian spokespeople brief the press. Our numbers increase daily – two, ten, twenty – and we become like fairground barkers touting the latest ghoulish sideshow. As briefers take turns, some engage in unscrupulous games of one-upmanship, deliberately raising casualty figures in an attempt to win tomorrow's headlines or interview and the media exposure which translates into dollar donations.

Late in the afternoon television crews set up on a little hillock alongside the main road and as I move from camera to camera, the interviewer often gasps and points behind me: another refugee has just died on the road.

The airport compound is off limits to the refugees, but someone forces a young child through the barbed wire into my arms. Panic. What can I do now? The mother has disappeared and I am an instant adoptive father. I take the little girl to the nearby French military hospital. A sour faced nurse demands, "What will happen if everyone starts throwing their children over the wire?" "Just this one. Please." The girl is accepted onto the ward. She dies in the night anyway.

REMORSE AND GUILT

If there is any time or strength left for reflection, it is often one of remorse, guilt and anger.

The camps, after all, are only the fallout of genocide. Some of the people we are feeding are murderers, their supporters or close family. How can their suffering – and at least 50,000 die from cholera in a matter of weeks – be compared with that of innocent victims still being bludgeoned and macheted to death inside Rwanda?

Defeated soldiers cradle their rifles and machine guns, lolling alongside the road, smirking or glowering at aid workers. Gangs of slickly dressed young men, decked out in dark sunglasses, rolls of cash in hand, guard the entrance to camps, eager to bankroll the continuing carnage. They remind me of nothing less than African replicas of Haiti's infamous Tonton Macoutes. But they are even more bloodthirsty.

There are, however, also innocents in these camps. Surely we can help those and do our duty, while the local government and the international community which is pouring billions of dollars of humanitarian aid into this situation, do theirs.

Shamefully, they refuse to send the only people trained to handle such situations – soldiers – into camps bristling with weapons to sort out the killers from the refugees, while perfectly willing to allow unarmed aid officials to work there. The sorry chapter of global inaction over the Rwandan tragedy continues.

Parts of the media buy into a slick PR campaign hatched in distant capitals which somehow turns logic on its head and manages to blame the humanitarians for the political and military quagmire that the 'suits' and diplomats refuse to tackle. Where are the political leaders when we need them?

Later, even deeper in the heart of the African rain forests journalists like Jane from the BBC and others, drop their pens and cameras to physically help pull people from the bush and then get out the word that aid officials cannot officially disclose about ongoing massacres. Honour restored.

RECALLING EVIL

Revisiting the camps a decade later, I find it almost impossible to reconcile yesterday and today. Kibumba is deserted, a flat plain of grass stretching to the foothills of the nearby mountains, the panorama broken only by a few low lying walls which the refugees had built around their hovels of plastic sheeting and twigs.

Did so much evil and death really permeate this place just a few years ago? And whatever happened to the pretty young girl and the baby she was breast-feeding when I last passed this way? Hopefully, they survived, which would help to place the overall tragedy into some kind of graspable human perspective.

At another camp, Mugunga, a link with the past is more evident, but death remains a constant visitor.

It was here that the génocidaires made a last stand in 1996, holding hundreds of thousands of refugees captive until advancing Zaire rebels, backed by soldiers of the new Rwandan army, smashed their resistance. The camp broke apart as tidal waves of humanity rolled eastwards back into Rwanda or westwards deeper into the rain forest. Only refuse and some mounds of dead bodies remained then.

Two years ago Mount Nyiragongo which casts a brooding shadow over Kivu, erupted in its full fury and buried the surrounding area in a molten flow. The authorities decided to move thousands of homeless civilians to the Mugunga site where they have constructed shanty towns of plastic sheeting, sticks, mud brick and breeze block strikingly similar to the earlier refugee cities.

Do Mugunga's latest residents know the history of this place? Do they remember the people murdered here? They are certainly aware of the bizarre fate of some refugees who took shelter in fissures in the volcanic rock and who were then poisoned by deadly gases seeping under the ground from the nearby Lake Kivu.

Today, signs warn of the dangers of living on the rocks. Flags, yellow, orange and red are hoisted to indicate the status of another possible volcanic eruption.

But there is one unfamiliar noise here. Laughter. More than 300 seven to 12-year-olds are attending school. These kids have virtually nothing and old pens proffered by a visitor become instant precious gifts. As they line up for class, the children begin to sing and the gentle rhythms waft across the former killing fields.

It is only a fleeting moment of hope plucked from a far darker tableau, but the sheer exuberance of the kids provide a wonderful antidote to my overpowering memories of death and destruction.

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 135: "New Europe and Asylum – What Next?" (June 2004). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (520Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here