Ugandan rebels are visiting anarchy on border villages, writes Rob Crillyin Doruma, Democratic Republic of Congo
THE SLAVING party found Raymond Kpiolebeyo as he returned home from his fields deep in the Congolese jungle. There was no escape from the men of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a shadowy cult-like rebel group, as they searched for porters, sex slaves and soldiers.
For eight days, the 28-year-old was marched at gunpoint through the steaming bush. Each night he was pinned under a plastic sheet weighted down with bags and stones to prevent him escaping.
"They told us that if one of us tried to escape we would all be shot," says Raymond, a teacher from the town of Doruma, close to the border with South Sudan.
The LRA's war against the Ugandan government is supposed to be over. For two years their ragtag band of fighters has camped over the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo as peace talks edged closer to a final deal.
But this year the raiding parties have brought misery to these tiny jungle villages. And for the past month a series of major attacks has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.
Negotiators still hold out hope that a war that forced two million people into squalid aid camps is past its nadir. Many of the war's victims in northern Uganda have begun leaving the sprawling shack cities where one generation was born and another died.
But in the border towns of the Democratic Republic of Congo a different picture emerges, one where slaving parties slog through the dense jungle snatching children barely big enough to carry AK-47 rifles.
After walking 10 hours a day for six days with a sack on his back and another on his head, Raymond arrived at a well-ordered camp filled with children - some the offspring of women kept by commanders, others being trained with guns.
"They were mobile. All the time they were organising," he says, sitting in the office of Doruma school where he teaches primary-age children. "Some were leaving for other villages and others were arriving."
LRA leader Joseph Kony is thought to have settled in the Democratic Republic of Congo two years ago, disappearing into Garamba National Park in the northeast of the country. It was part of a gentlemen's agreement with the Congolese government: he was offered a safe haven from which to seek peace; in return, his troops would steer clear of locals.
Raymond says the camp was a bustling town. Thatched huts stood in neat rows, while labourers farmed sweet potato, maize and beans.
At night a solar-powered television was brought out and the young soldiers would watch noisy American war films.
After six nights living in Kony's jungle headquarters, Raymond had the chance of escape. He was woken by a tap on the head from another prisoner. It was the signal to leave. The two tiptoed over sleeping soldiers before breaking for the bush around the camp.
He was one of the lucky ones. Five families in Doruma have had children snatched this year with little hope of seeing them returned.
Sitting on a low bamboo bench in the shade of a mango tree Christine Kutiote describes how her 13-year-old niece, Marie, was taken as she tried to cross the river for a visit. Now, she keeps her own four children close to home.
"I'm a Christian and I pray for them and that security will get better," she says in the local Zande language, as a priest translates her words into French. Her low, simple home told a different story. Its mud walls bore a pattern of white spots used by witch doctors to ward off evil. They have little else to protect them. There is no army, the handful of police officers is unarmed and help can only arrive by aircraft or motorcycle, bumping for six hours along swampy tracks from Dungu, where the United Nations and Congolese army have a base.
Burned-out buildings bear the scars of previous attacks by Kony's followers. A hospital has few drugs and no anaesthetics.
This is a region well used to conflict. Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola all sent soldiers and support for a five-year civil war that claimed at least three million lives by the time it ended in 2002.
A renegade Congolese commander has also stepped up offensives in recent weeks, adding to the anarchy. The result is a lawless jungle land where the LRA's shadowy movement has been able quietly to reorganise.
An intelligence document compiled by the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, known as Monuc, spells out the scale of the threat. It says the LRA used peace talks to organise itself into a more effective fighting force.
The 670-strong band now has more than 150 satellite telephones, many bought with cash meant to aid communications during the talks. "Kony now has the ability to divide his forces into very simple groups and to reassemble them at will. When put together with his proven mastery of bush warfare, this gives him new potency within his area of operations," it concludes.
Once again, the thick, humid jungle of the Democratic Republic of Congo is being used for someone else's war.''