Ornela Mbenga Sebo during the interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

Ornela Mbenga Sebo, a young Congolese woman, escaped in 2011 from a rebel camp in an unidentified location in Africa where she was being held as a slave and stowed away in the garbage bay of a merchant ship, with no idea where it was headed.

When the ship reached its destination two weeks later, she found out she was in Santos, an Atlantic ocean port in southeast Brazil.

She is one of hundreds of people from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who have sought refuge in Brazil.

Mbenga Sebo was born in Walikale, in the eastern DRC province of North Kivu. Armed groups and the army are fighting over the gold, cassiterite, coltan and other minerals in that region.

But until 2011, she appeared to be safe from the violence. Her family had a comfortable life. Her father taught at the university, and she was studying journalism and working in a bank. She had learned English and French and had travelled abroad.“We walked for two weeks. I found other people who were also escaping: people who were sick, children, women and men.” -- Ornela Mbenga Sebo

Her odyssey began in January 2011, when she was 21. Walikale became the target of an attack by insurgents, who slaughtered local residents and set fire to homes and public buildings.

She was at work when the rebel invasion began. She hid there until things calmed down, before running home. But her house was burning and there was no sign of her family.

Alone, with just the clothes on her back, she walked for weeks with other people who were running away from the violence. Her aim was to reach the capital, Kinshasa, where her grandparents lived.

“I was on foot,” she told IPS. “We walked for two weeks. I found other people who were also escaping: people who were sick, children, women and men.”

The DRC, a vast, resource-rich country in Central Africa, has been caught up in armed conflict between government forces and different armed groups for decades. Some of the insurgent groups have ties to neighbouring Rwanda and Burundi.

In 2010, a United Nations fact-finding mission documented a range of human rights crimes, including mass rapes, by the militias and the army itself in Walikale.

Mbenga Sebo described the terror she felt as she walked through ghost towns, abandoned and destroyed, only inhabited by the bodies strewn along the streets.

“It’s so vivid in my mind that when I talk about it it’s like I’m back in that place again,” she said.

The biggest danger was running into armed groups, “who roamed from town to town looking for people to kill,” she said.

On more than one occasion she pretended to be dead, to save her life.

But she ended up being captured and taken to a camp, where she was kept as a slave along with dozens of other people.

The armed men who seized her were Rwandan, she said. They loaded her and the rest of the group she was travelling with onto three helicopters. The trip took about two hours. From what she could see from the air, the camp they arrived at was not near a town or any populated area.

Charly Nzalambila, a Congolese volunteer with Caritas Brazil who helped transcribe Mbenga Sebo’s story to submit to the authorities in Brazil, believes the men were members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.

When they were communicating by radio, her captors spoke Swahili and some English, Mbenga Sebo said.

She spent all day hauling buckets of water to supply the rebel camp. The insurgents “forced the women to sleep with them, wash their clothes, and cook their meals. I slept on the ground. They would beat me. I suffered moral, physical and mental abuse,” she said.

But one day she met a young man who took pity on her and helped her escape, showing her that the camp was near a port. He told her they were in Tanzania, but IPS was unable to verify this.

Late one night in February, she climbed over the wall surrounding the camp, and made it to a merchant ship. “It was a matter of life or death,” she said.

The only thing she found to eat were some peanuts. Two weeks later, after discovering that she had landed in the Brazilian port of Santos, the second surprise was realising that she could understand the local language – Portuguese – because she had once spent a year in Angola with her family.

She quickly made contact with people from Angola and DRC living in Brazil, and not long after her arrival, she was living as a refugee in Rio de Janeiro.

This country of 198 million has no limits on the number of people who can be granted refugee status. According to the law on refugees, passed in 1997, even people who have entered the country using false documents can apply for refugee protection.

Destination unknown

Fleeing overseas with no clear destination may not be so uncommon among Africans desperately escaping violence and armed conflict.

“Many young people fleeing these situations end up in Brazil by chance,” Angolan refugee Fernando Ngury told IPS in 2007, 10 years after the law on refugees took effect.

“Many stow away on ships that they believe are heading to Europe, and find themselves instead in Brazil. But some are thrown overboard at sea,” said Ngury, the head of the Centre for the Defence of Refugee Human Rights (CEDHUR).

According to the latest official figures, there are 4,715 people from 74 different countries who have been granted refugee status in Brazil today. The largest groups are made up of nearly 1,700 Angolans, 700 Colombians and some 500 people from the DRC.

Of the 4,715 refugees, 2,012 still receive assistance from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

There are also 1,441 people who have applied, and are still waiting, for refugee status.

The process of requesting refugee protection in Brazil begins at the National Committee for Refugees (CONARE), in the Justice Ministry.

Rebuilding

Now 23, Mbenga Sebo is rebuilding her life little by little. Today she shares a house with four Congolese roommates in a suburb of Rio. As a refugee, she has the right to work and has full access to public services, such as healthcare and education.

The fact that she speaks several languages helped her get a job as a receptionist at the Technological Park of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she has also made friends.

Recently, through the online social networking site Facebook, she received wonderful news: that her parents and siblings are still alive.

She learned that her family had managed to flee by bus to Senegal, with the savings they had in their home. Today they are living in Chicago. Her mother is working as a waitress in a hotel and her father is unemployed.

Her dream is to join her family in the U.S. Her friends and office mates are trying to raise funds over the Internet to buy her a plane ticket for Chicago.

She said she had no intention of returning to the DRC. “I love my country, I am African, but I would only go back if the situation changes and it is safe. And even then, only to visit my grandparents, who are still there.”

Her workmate, George Patiño, told IPS: “She is an example of strength, conviction and hope.” It was his idea to turn to crowdfunding, on the Brazilian web site Vakinha, to send Mbenga Sebo to Chicago.

Patiño hopes to raise the necessary 2,500 dollars in three months. The Ornela Mundi campaign was launched on Vakinha Sept. 5, and 26 percent of the funds needed have been raised so far.

“She has always managed to overcome, and she’ll find happiness in the end,” Patiño said.

Mbenga Sebo’s story deserves to be told in a book, according to Brazilian journalist Ana Paula Laport, who is preparing to write her biography.

Excerpt:

Gabriel Seltoc trekked for three weeks, barefoot, from the DRC after soldiers started shooting inside his house. He fled wearing his precious seven-year-old cowboy hat, a navy jacket, beige t-shirt, and brown trousers, which he bought at a market four years ago. Courtesy: UNHCR/Lucy Beck

By Amy Fallon
RWAMWANJA REFUGEE CAMP, Uganda, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

If you were forced to flee your home to survive, what would you take? What could you take? Jean Claude “Van Damme” Ndongizimana, 20, escaped from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with just the bag in which he kept his profits from selling milk and the clothes on his back.

He was forced to flee after M23 rebels fighting government troops attacked his village and attempted to recruit him two months ago. He eventually found his way to the Rwamwanja refugee camp in Kamwenge district, southwestern Uganda, which is currently home to more than 40,000 Congolese refugees.

The youth is one of nine refugees featured in a new photography exhibition being run by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The photos show the refugees and the possessions they took with them when they fled their homes.

In his photo Ndongizimana sits on the grass with his black bag around his neck. In another shot, Florence Mukeshimana, 30, poses with her five young children and the old saucepan she grabbed before fleeing her home after her husband was blown up by a landmine. “When I found out my husband was dead I lost hope and decided to leave the country,” Mukeshimana says.

The images were unveiled over a week ago and will go on display at the Mish Mash Restaurant and Art Gallery in Kampala on Jul. 2.  The exhibition will run for three weeks and hopes to draw attention to the thousands of people around the globe forced to escape war or persecution every day.“After 20 years of fighting, a latent fatigue with the unceasing plight of eastern Congo means there is not enough funding to meet the needs of more than 900,000 people living in camps in North Kivu.” -- Oxfam International’s Humanitarian programme coordinator for the DRC, Tariq Rieb.

During his interview with IPS, Ndongizimana wears a blue raincoat, oversized brown trousers, and lace up sneakers with tattered soles – the ones he was wearing when he left his country two months ago.  His beloved plaid cap rests on his head and displays a sticker of Arsenal football player Bacary Sagna, acquired from a chewing gum packet after Ndongizimana crossed the border into neighbouring Uganda.

“I love football here,” Ndongizimana, who has been known to kick a ball around Rwamwanja, tells IPS.

According to UNHCR, the security situation in eastern DRC has been precarious since July 2011, causing regular influxes of refugees into Uganda.

Fresh fighting between M23, an armed group started by former Tutsi soldiers who mutinied in April 2012, the DRC army, and other local armed groups, has uprooted thousands more. According to the UNHCR, almost 70,000 people were forced to flee to neighbouring Uganda, and some 2.2 million were displaced internally. Rwamwanja was reopened in 2012 by Uganda to accommodate new arrivals.

In May, hundreds of Congolese crossed the border to avoid being forcibly conscripted into M23’s ranks, according to the UNHCR. It took Ndongizimana three weeks to make the journey.

“We would run, we would sleep somewhere. We would run again, and then it rained on us. We would sleep somewhere, we would wake up. Our clothes were torn,” he says, describing the journey.

Ndongizimana now fears the worst about his parents and siblings back home and says he wants to stay in Uganda.

“If I can learn how to box, I can support myself in the future,” he says. “I will only go home if we have peace.”

Last month South Africa began deploying troops to Goma, a city in eastern DRC, to reinforce the Tanzanian and Malawian contingent that will form the U.N. Intervention Brigade. On Mar. 28, the U.N. Security Council resolved to move its presence in the DRC from a stabilisation and peace-keeping force to an intervention one. The 3,000-strong force should be fully operational by the middle of July.

“The situation will certainly evolve once the brigade is fully operational,” head of the UNHCR office in Goma, Kouassi Lazare Etien, tells IPS.

“If the brigade intervenes against M23 we can expect a deterioration of the security situation in the Masisi and Rutshuru territories (in North Kivu province), which could lead to further population movements towards Uganda.”

As World Refugee Day was being celebrated in Rwamwanja on Jun. 20, the DRC’s government deployed hundreds of soldiers and tanks along the frontier with M23, indicating they may want to attack rebel positions.

Peace talks have been unsuccessfully staged in Kampala, under the auspices of the chairperson of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

“If they fail to reach an agreement and in case the intervention brigade launches attacks against the armed groups, especially M23, one can expect a huge influx of population into Uganda,” says Etien.

Oxfam International’s Humanitarian programme coordinator for the DRC, Tariq Riebl, tells IPS that fighting across several North Kivu territories is forcing people from their homes every week, and the ongoing violence often makes it difficult for agencies to reach those in need.

“After 20 years of fighting, a latent fatigue with the unceasing plight of eastern Congo means there is not enough funding to meet the needs of more than 900,000 people living in camps in North Kivu,” he says.

“People urgently need security and protection, as well as access to basic needs, including clean water, health services, shelter and food.”

Gabriel Seltoc trekked for three weeks, barefoot, from the DRC after soldiers started shooting inside his house. The 75-year-old, who is also featured in the exhibition, made a living back home as a traditional dancer.

Seltoc began the journey to Uganda with his wife and two children, but was separated from them along the way. Now he spends his days alone. He fled the DRC wearing his precious seven-year-old cowboy hat, a navy jacket, beige t-shirt, and brown trousers, which he bought at a market four years ago. He is featured in the exhibition in his cowboy hat.

“The war started when I was putting on these clothes one day,” says Seltoc. “They took all my things. They took my clothes, my cows, my house. Nothing is there. I can’t go back. For what? I have nothing to start (rebuilding with).”

Refugees who early arrived in the morning from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu region, crossing the border to the Nyakabande Transit Centre in search of a better life. Credit: Bastian Schnabel/IPS

By Taylor Toeka Kakala
GOMA, DR Congo , Jun 21 2013 (IPS)

Tuyisenge*, a former teacher from the Democratic Republic of Congo province of North Kivu, sat on a tree stump watching his fellow refugees go about their lives along the terraces of the hillside Kigeme Refugee Camp in southern Rwanda.

He is one of some 14,000 Congolese refugees living at the camp.

“I decided to flee after my wife and two daughters were raped by the army before my eyes,” he told IPS, his voice choking with sobs.

Ngutuye, 33, lies on a mat in front of her tent. She also fled North Kivu province in eastern DRC, in April 2012, after her civilian husband was killed in the crossfire between the Congolese army and the M23 rebels.

A 20-year cycle of violence in eastern DRC has forced hundreds of thousands of people to seek refuge beyond this Central African country’s borders.

Since April 2012, fighting in North Kivu province has displaced some 2.2 million people and caused almost 70,000 to flee to neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Of these refugees, 24,123 fled to Rwanda.

According to the Rwandan government, this has added to the existing population of 43,000 refugees in the country, 99 percent of whom are Congolese.

The majority of these refugees live in the four Rwandan camps of Kigeme, Gihembe, Kiziba and Nyabiheke. A few urban refugees also live in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

But the 2012 exodus is just the latest in a mass displacement of Congolese that began almost two decades ago. It first started in March 1993 when thousands fled the DRC after violent ethnic clashes erupted in Ntoto, North Kivu, and spread to rural areas in South Kivu province.

The second group of Congolese refugees, who were mostly Tutsis, left the DRC in 1994 upon the arrival of some 1.2 million Rwandan Hutus in the country after the Rwandan genocide, when an estimated 800,000 people, mainly minority Tutsis, were killed by Hutus in 100 days.

More people fled the DRC during the First Congo War, from 1996 to 1997, when Rwanda invaded the Central African nation to oust then President Mobutu Sese Seko (1965-1997).

A year later, the Second Congo War began and more Congolese fled the country from 1998 to 2003. According to World Genocide Watch, an international NGO that works to protect people from genocide, more than 5.4 million people died in the two Congo wars.

But returning Congolese refugees to their homes remains a pressing issue. It is a topic that lies at the heart of a number of negotiations and agreements between the Congolese government and rebels in eastern DRC.

On Mar. 6 Ugandan Defence Minister Crispus Kiyonga, who is also chair of the Kampala negotiations between the Congolese government and the M23 rebels, said the repatriation of refugees based in Rwanda had not been effective.

Others in the DRC agree. “The return of refugees based in Rwanda has always been a touchy issue,” Emmanuel Kamanzi, a Tutsi community leader in Goma, told IPS.

Kamanzi believes that local communities in the DRC are afraid that if Congolese Tutsi refugees return from Rwanda, it will create competition for land. In 2010, Masti Nots, the head of the North Kivu UNHCR office, predicted that “the land issue will be one of the main obstacles to the return of refugees.”

Jean-Claude Chito, a lawyer at the Justice and Peace Commission of the Catholic Diocese of Goma, concurred.

“The ambiguities of the 1973 Land Act are the source of land conflicts in the DRC,” he told IPS.

The act provides for the co-existence of two land tenure systems, one based on traditional customs and the other on statutory law. Under the traditional land tenure system, a traditional chief, who is the custodian of ancestral lands, is authorised to allocate land to community members. Under the other, the government has the power to appropriate land. However, conflicts arise when both traditional chief and the state allocate land titles to the same property.

The situation is further complicated by a stipulation that allows any individual in the rebel-held area in eastern DRC to obtain a title deed. It has resulted in an influx of people to these areas and created a competition for land with local communities.

But Bahati Kahembe, one of the four traditional chiefs appointed to the provincial assembly in North Kivu, told IPS: “That is not true.”

It seems however that for now, authorities do not have to worry about the competition for land, because the refugees are not returning.

Simplice Kpanji, the communications director at the UNHCR regional office in Kinshasa, the DRC capital, told IPS “the security situation is not favourable for the repatriation of (Congolese) refugees.”

*Name changed to protect identity.

For the past five years, babies have been born in health centres managed by humanitarian organisations in North Kivu, DRC. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Taylor Toeka Kakala
GOMA, DR Congo, Jun 2 2013 (IPS)

“Many hospitals and health centres” that are not run by NGOs “do not meet health standards,” according to Dominique Baabo, provincial medical inspector for North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The health sector in the DRC faces serious medical challenges including having to deal with obsolete biomedical equipment, the lack of cold rooms for vaccine storage, and a shortage of qualified personnel, Baabo told IPS. He added that a lack of maternity wards in the country posed an obstacle to health care here.

But a lack of maternity facilities is not what the people of Matanda, a region in North Kivu province, have to worry about any longer. Theophile Kaboy, the Catholic bishop of Goma, opened a maternity ward in Matanda’s local health centre on May 15. The local diocesan medical office manages the health centre.

“I am not used to giving birth in a maternity ward since one had to travel between two and three days before giving birth in Kirotse (30 km away) or to Masisi (25 km away),” Jeannette Uwera, the first woman to give birth at the new maternity ward in Matanda’s local health centre, told IPS.

Mado Uwiteka, another Matanda resident, told IPS that in the past she had to be “carried to the maternity hospital in Kirotse on a stretcher by foot to deliver two of my children.”

“My three other children were delivered at home,” Uwiteka said. Two of her three children that were delivered at home died before their first birthday.

“But it was easy to get to the maternity hospital in Matanda because it’s close by,” she added.

However, in North Kivu, where a long-running conflict has raged, civil society representatives point out that humanitarian agencies have replaced the state – which has practically abdicated responsibility in every sector.

For the past five years, babies have been born in health centres managed by humanitarian organisations. Along every road, you can see new or rehabilitated structures fitted out by humanitarian agencies, “in line with the provincial health inspectorate’s programme,” Baabo noted.

The State of the World’s Mothers 2013 report released on May 7 by international NGO Save the Children ranked the DRC last out of 176 countries on its Mother’s Index. It assesses the well being of mothers according to a number of factors, including maternal health figures and under-five mortality.

The report states that one in 30 women in the DRC is at risk of dying from pregnancy-related complications. In Finland, ranked first on the index, only one out of 12,200 women is at risk.

Speaking to health sector representatives on May 10 in DRC’s capital, Kinshasa, Congolese Health Minister Felix Kabange reacted to the report with an admission that this central African nation will not be able to meet its United Nations Millennium Development Goals to reduce infant mortality by two thirds between 1990 and 2015, or to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters over the same period.

The eight MDGs, adopted by all U.N. member states in 2000, aim to curb poverty, disease and gender inequality.

Although maternal mortality has fallen from 1,800 deaths per live birth to 549 since 1990, “if we continue to deal with the situation in the same way, the country will not even meet these goals in 2065,” the minister said.

Kalume Mushaba, an obstetrics lecturer at the University of Goma, believes that the DRC’s problem is one of leadership. He said that health allocations in this country have never exceeded five percent of the national budget.

The DRC is a signatory to the 2001 Abuja Declaration, in which African countries pledged to allocate 15 percent of their national budgets to health.

Together with Afghanistan, Haiti and the Darfur region in western Sudan, the DRC is amongst the world’s most volatile regions, and receives the most development aid. “Despite this, we are ranked last on the human development index,” Mushaba told IPS.

According to a 2009 study by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), health care remains unaffordable for eight out of 10 women. North Kivu has one doctor per 23,328 inhabitants and one nurse for every 1,100 inhabitants. The World Health Organization recommends one doctor per 10,000 inhabitants.

These figures show an overall poor quality of healthcare in North Kivu, the UNDP study said.

In order to improve maternal and infant health, Mushaba appealed to authorities to address the “three delays” that prevent women from seeking or obtaining care. These are the reluctance to use maternity hospitals for financial or cultural reasons; lack of transport to, or knowledge of, existing services; and inadequate equipment or shortages of qualified personnel.

A month ago, the government signed over 12 million dollars to the U.N. Children’s Fund to purchase radiology and ultrasound equipment, generators, operating tables and solar-powered refrigerators, for the 70 general referral hospitals in the DRC. This marks a new start, said Kabange.

Included in the equipment, which was received on May 10, were 200 gynaecological tables, 5,000 hospital beds, 7,200 examination beds, and pharmaceutical products, the health minister said. “We want to save the lives of more mothers and children, and to protect newborns,” he added.