With the air of the hunted coming into the open, the hidden victims of the Congo war are finally coming to light.

In the south-eastern province of Katanga, a stream of civilians has been cautiously emerging from hiding places in the bush in recent weeks. Emaciated and terrified, they arrive in the towns carrying dying children in their arms and bringing tales of terrible atrocities.

Wakibawa Kyakudju struggled into Manono, the town she had fled a year earlier. Like much of Katanga, Manono was once blessed with productive mines and a rich agricultural hinterland. Now, following years of government bombing and rebel depredations, it is a ghost town.

The exhausted woman made it to the hospital, an overcrowded, malodorous place where brave doctors are coping with meagre resources. Sitting on a bed and cradling her inert four-year-old son, Kitwe, she described the misery and terror of the bush.

"We ate wild fruit and leaves and slept under a tree. The soldiers raped some women. Other people were murdered. When we arrived here I was completely naked, not even underwear." She lifted her son's shirt to reveal scab-encrusted skin and badly swollen limbs, the telltale signs of severe malnutrition. "Really," she said quietly, "we have suffered."

The true horror of the Congo war, which started three years ago this month, is only now becoming clear. The worst is to be found in the east of the country, where the UN estimates more than a million people have been driven from their homes; another agency says up to 2.5 million have died, mostly from disease and starvation.

Western aid workers are only now getting access to some of those displaced people. Most are still in hiding in the bush, but those who have dared to venture out are recounting their experiences of rape, pillage and indiscriminate murder at the hands of the myriad gunmen who roam eastern Congo.

"In this war nothing is sacred and nobody is neutral," said Claude Jibidar of the UN World Food Programme in Kongolo, another town with a hospital full of starving children with thin, greying hair and dulled eyes. "The civil population is everybody's enemy. You wonder who is fighting for whom."

Officially in Congo, the fighting is on hold. A peace deal between Joseph Kabila's government and the rebel movement is finally taking root and thousands of troops have withdrawn from the frontline positions. Inside the vast eastern sector, however, nominally under rebel control, a deadly "second war" continues to rage.

Its protagonists are a bewildering range of militia driven by nationalism, ethnic hatred or just plain greed. Its victims are almost exclusively civilians.

The fight is between the widely despised RCD, the Congolese Rally for Democracy which is backed by the Rwandan army, and the Mayi-Mayi, a traditional Congolese militia based on the belief that water protects its fighters from enemy bullets. Another armed group is the Intera hamwe, the Hutu extremists who fled to Congo after committing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and have been wreaking havoc there since.

All sides are guilty of human rights abuses. In some areas, the Mayi-Mayi has developed into a popular resistance force against the hated RCD, but in Katanga it represents nothing more than coldblooded banditry. In Manono, 23-year-old Kungu Mobali recalled being caught up in a Mayi-Mayi attack. "They took our clothes, raped the women and killed those they said were with the RCD. Those people, they really kill without pity," he said.

In Sola, a village 150 miles to the north, a Catholic priest described one incident. "Our local chief was denounced as a rebel collaborator," said Father Raphael Katunda. "When they killed him, they cut off his hand, tied it on a string and paraded it around for everyone to see." Under Belgian colonial rule, white rubber traders would cut off villagers' hands if production quotas were not met.

The RCD and Interahamwe are also accused of atrocities. In one instance RCD soldiers were alleged to have buried 15 women alive after torturing them. The UN has also collected evidence from some of 2,000 women raped by the Interahamwe around the town of Shabunda over a period of several months last year.

Up to now these people's plight has been largely hidden from the outside world. Few aid agencies work in eastern Congo and they are usually confined to the relative security of major towns. Those which venture into the countryside risk paying the ultimate price. Six Red Cross workers were hacked to death last April in the north-eastern Ituri province by unidentified gunmen.

There is also a problem of money. Western donors have been shy of giving money to the Congo, even though it was the actions of aid agencies, whose refugee camps in Congo after the 1994 genocide gave the Interahamwe the space to regroup, which helped to create the conditions for the war.

The UN says $112 million is needed to feed 1.3 million war victims between now and the end of next year. So far just one third of that, of which $280,000 has been donated by Ireland, has been received.

"What is being done right now is so minuscule that it's not even a drop in the ocean," admitted Vincent Lalai of Oxfam last Tuesday at the launch of a report detailing the scale of the crisis. There are signs, however, of a scaled-up humanitarian response. In Katanga province, where Irish troops served in the disastrous UN mission of the early 1960s, the UN has started a limited airlift to remote villages such as Manono. In aid-speak, the "humanitarian space" is starting to open up.

It is only the start, said Claude Jibidar of WFP. Funding is particularly urgently needed for aircraft as most roads are either impassable or have been reclaimed by nature. "Up to now few people have understood the need for an airlift, including our own offices," he said.

More humanitarian aid also carries dangers of its own. The confidence to plunge into the bush comes partly from the arrival of armed UN troops under the Monuc mission. Mainly from non-Western countries such as Morocco, Tunisia and Uruguay, the troops are currently establishing bases throughout Congo.

But the Monuc mandate is humanitarian and not military. The soldiers' job is to protect military observers monitoring the ceasefire between government and rebels. It does not involve disarming the various militia or protecting food or medical stocks from the looting which has characterised the war. In the event of a Mayi-Mayi attack on a hospital, for instance, the UN troops would theoretically be powerless to protect those supplies.

Many Congolese, fed up with a war started by outside countries, initially had high hopes for the Monuc mission. Now disillusionment is already setting in. "We want the Monuc to intervene with force for once and for all to stop this war," said orphanage worker Rosette Mwaka in the lakeside town of Kalemie, "but it just stands by and watches, doing nothing."