Crazy Crazy Demographics
Yesterday.....
We left Goma early to try out the landcruiser on some very bad roads in Masisi Province. After talking to the big league emergency response actors, in North Kivu we identified a community in North Kivu in need of emergency assistance following the latest fighting in the province.
By a magical stroke of serendipity we found what we were looking just under our noses: Rubaya, a small town that over the last few weeks has astonishingly doubled its population size.
Before the latest war, Rubaya had a population of 13,400 people. This population deserted the town in October 2007 following heavy fighting between the government and the CNDP. CNDP fell back from Masisi and established their front line not very far from here and started to run their own administration in Rubaya, and in that remarkable, humbling Congolese way, the communities started to come back. The thinking is now that 60% of the population has returned to get back to their agriculture, trading and mining the cassieirite and coltan that is found in abundance nearby.
It’s a tidy little place, wooden houses with tin roves that sparkle in the brilliant high altitude sunlight. Rubaya has a vibrant market and the usual quota for motorbike taxis, cheap and shiny Chinese radios and bad taste Congolese bling wide boys.
The thing that strikes you is the children. Hoards and hoards of snotty nosed toddlers are to be seen around every corner, and the most of them were very exited to see me! With my demographer’s glasses I was struggling to understand how the mothers of this little town could be so fecund? The administrator explained to me that although only sixty percent of the community had returned to Rubaya, the town is now home to approximately 20,000 more IDPs who have been fleeing fighting that started up again in September and continues to the present day. This migration would confuse even the world’s leading demographers, and for us the task of identifying the people with most needs is going to be complicated; and complicated by yet another factor: all of the IDPs are hidden. There is no camp, no distribution centre. We visited houses built for a family containing not one but three households; the pressure that this population is putting on the carrying capacity of Rubaya is immense. At the moment, the host families are apparently extending hospitality to the IDPs, but we know that IDPs are being forced to labour for the host families in return for shelter and, even though the authorities have denied it, that the IDPs are being forced to contribute five dollars monthly to the hosting families.
So Rubaya is buzzing; the feeling of relative prosperity is most likely attributable to the productive artisanal extraction of minerals from open cast mines near the town. Mining towns always have their dark side: an extremely wealthy commercial elite, and a dirt poor majority population. The violence that exists around similar cultures in Congo is in evidence here, people making money, getting drunk, and taking out their drunkenness on their wives and children. I would be very interested to look at HIV rates in Rubaya.
Its not very surprising then that CNDP control has been beefed up: if you control Rubaya I would guess you control some of the most productive mines in Masisi territory. CNDP foot soldiers were volubly in evidence around the town, faces hardened to the elements, sincerely lacking in any warmth, and armed to the teeth. Reminded me of Sri Lanka, Sudan, you name the internal armed, conflict: a disciplined motivated armed group ready to make war with a national army which is not committed to the cause, and would really rather be at home watching the football with a can of beer. What makes the whole thing a little bit spiceier in Rubaya is that it’s fairly obvious that some of the CNDP’s plain clothed colleagues, only speak Kinyarwanda and English. Is this a resource war with an ethnic tinge, or an ethnic war with a resource tinge, or is it a plain old international resource based conflict?
I didn’t really have time to think about these imponderables today, Brid and Me spent most of the day measuring MUAC’s. And the good news is that the grand melee of under fives in Rubaya are not malnourished. The suffering of these people is a lot less difficult to measure than the mean upper arm circumference of a sick kid. In our protection monitoring yesterday we understood that this community had been systematically pillaged and the prevalence of gender violence in our sample indicated that its not just the FARDC and the Mai Mai who violate in this town.
We left Goma early to try out the landcruiser on some very bad roads in Masisi Province. After talking to the big league emergency response actors, in North Kivu we identified a community in North Kivu in need of emergency assistance following the latest fighting in the province.
By a magical stroke of serendipity we found what we were looking just under our noses: Rubaya, a small town that over the last few weeks has astonishingly doubled its population size.
Before the latest war, Rubaya had a population of 13,400 people. This population deserted the town in October 2007 following heavy fighting between the government and the CNDP. CNDP fell back from Masisi and established their front line not very far from here and started to run their own administration in Rubaya, and in that remarkable, humbling Congolese way, the communities started to come back. The thinking is now that 60% of the population has returned to get back to their agriculture, trading and mining the cassieirite and coltan that is found in abundance nearby.
It’s a tidy little place, wooden houses with tin roves that sparkle in the brilliant high altitude sunlight. Rubaya has a vibrant market and the usual quota for motorbike taxis, cheap and shiny Chinese radios and bad taste Congolese bling wide boys.
The thing that strikes you is the children. Hoards and hoards of snotty nosed toddlers are to be seen around every corner, and the most of them were very exited to see me! With my demographer’s glasses I was struggling to understand how the mothers of this little town could be so fecund? The administrator explained to me that although only sixty percent of the community had returned to Rubaya, the town is now home to approximately 20,000 more IDPs who have been fleeing fighting that started up again in September and continues to the present day. This migration would confuse even the world’s leading demographers, and for us the task of identifying the people with most needs is going to be complicated; and complicated by yet another factor: all of the IDPs are hidden. There is no camp, no distribution centre. We visited houses built for a family containing not one but three households; the pressure that this population is putting on the carrying capacity of Rubaya is immense. At the moment, the host families are apparently extending hospitality to the IDPs, but we know that IDPs are being forced to labour for the host families in return for shelter and, even though the authorities have denied it, that the IDPs are being forced to contribute five dollars monthly to the hosting families.
So Rubaya is buzzing; the feeling of relative prosperity is most likely attributable to the productive artisanal extraction of minerals from open cast mines near the town. Mining towns always have their dark side: an extremely wealthy commercial elite, and a dirt poor majority population. The violence that exists around similar cultures in Congo is in evidence here, people making money, getting drunk, and taking out their drunkenness on their wives and children. I would be very interested to look at HIV rates in Rubaya.
Its not very surprising then that CNDP control has been beefed up: if you control Rubaya I would guess you control some of the most productive mines in Masisi territory. CNDP foot soldiers were volubly in evidence around the town, faces hardened to the elements, sincerely lacking in any warmth, and armed to the teeth. Reminded me of Sri Lanka, Sudan, you name the internal armed, conflict: a disciplined motivated armed group ready to make war with a national army which is not committed to the cause, and would really rather be at home watching the football with a can of beer. What makes the whole thing a little bit spiceier in Rubaya is that it’s fairly obvious that some of the CNDP’s plain clothed colleagues, only speak Kinyarwanda and English. Is this a resource war with an ethnic tinge, or an ethnic war with a resource tinge, or is it a plain old international resource based conflict?
I didn’t really have time to think about these imponderables today, Brid and Me spent most of the day measuring MUAC’s. And the good news is that the grand melee of under fives in Rubaya are not malnourished. The suffering of these people is a lot less difficult to measure than the mean upper arm circumference of a sick kid. In our protection monitoring yesterday we understood that this community had been systematically pillaged and the prevalence of gender violence in our sample indicated that its not just the FARDC and the Mai Mai who violate in this town.
posted by Gabriello Princip at 1:40 AM
1 Comments:
Ferg, I have said this many times, your writing is magical my friend. As Melchett sang to Blackadder "row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Belts off, trousers down, isn't life a scream"
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