Today I had a chance to speak to Roger Ligo, my Caritas colleague who has been driving us expertly along DR Congo’s treacherous roads.
In 1999 when fighting broke out in northern Ituri, Roger and his family were just 40km away from it in Fataki. Old rivalries between the Lendu and Hema tribes in the region had hit breaking point and the Lendu had started sweeping down through Ituri killing Hema and taking their land.
Roger is Hema, and so he and his family had to flee. The fighting was so close so quickly they couldn’t go home to collect their three-year-old daughter Rosie.
Roger told me: “The family had to run. All the straw houses in the town were on fire. We hid and went back the next day to get our child. But she was dead. In the town all those who had not been able to get away - the young, the old and the disabled – had been killed.
“Then we had to run again. We took the road to Bunia. During that journey I saw things that are still in my head; that are too bad. I saw bodies beside the road, I saw children cutting children with machetes. Terrible things.
“While fleeing I was attacked by Lendu troops and hit with an arrow that went into my thigh. It took a long time to heal and gives me pain even now.
“I have let Rosie and what happened to her leave my heart now, it is in the past. But what is left is in my head. It is very hard to cope with.”
In Mongbwalu too the fighting came and bodies were strewn along the very roads I travelled today. According to Roger around 15,000 people fled from the north of Ituri, many ending up in Bunia. Roger and his family among them.
“Eventually Hema retaliated and there was another terrible and violent conflict. I am not a brutal person and I hate things that do harm. I was glad the UN came in 2004 to stop the fighting.
“I have never been back to Fataki. I am better in Bunia. I don’t want to go back and I don’t want to think about it. Perhaps little by little I will want to return, but not yet.”
After living a year in Bunia without permanent work, Roger wrote to Caritas to ask for a job. He now works in the Bunia office as a driver and mechanic.
He has also been helping recently on a research project on the pygmy communities in the mine site area. On our journey from Bunia to Mongbwalu his local knowledge of communities, plant and animal life were invaluable to our environmental scientist Robert Goodland.
Roger now has five children, the youngest of whom is just five months old.
Posted by PascaleP
Pascale is travelling to the Democratic Republic of Congo to visit AngloGold Ashanti’s mine site in Mongbwalu to collect stories for the Unearth Justice campaign.
She is then heading to Goma, on the border with Rwanda, to see how the £2m CAFOD supporters raised for DR Congo has been spent.
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