The wounded Congolese are laid out along the corridor. Since there is a shortage of water they make due with sweeping up the dried blood which encircles the silhouettes of the twisted figures turned towards the wall. Nobody weeps or moans, the people stare into the void, beaten and resigned.

A young girl brought in the day before is pointing at her crushed foot and the smell of dead flesh already rises from the cloth she has wrapped tightly around her wound. Another young girl shows off her cheek, flayed by an exploding shell, and demonstrates that her flesh is already beginning to get infected. A mother has had her chest pierced by a bullet and her breath is no more than a wheeze.

The male nurse sighs: Also last night, in the corridor, three patients died because we had no antibiotics to stop the infections. He leads us to a small room where a woman with a serene face is lying. Her joined hands rest on her colored loincloth; she looks like a figure carved in wax.

A surgeon approaches, his eyes dull: She had a perforated abdomen. I operated on her last night for 2 hours with unsterilized instruments by the light of a hand held torch. At the beginning the operation succeeded, she was saved. But she died all the same, her blood drained away and we have no means of giving her a transfusion, there are no reserves of blood.

If the corridors of the clinic, crowded with the wounded which the people carry here on their backs, seem like the antechambers of death, the cellars of the building are like hell.

Here, for three days, people have been lying on the ground. They are without water, without light, without food. The heat is stifling, there is no air. There are faint moans when the walls shake from the explosion of each shell fired in the distance. The terror is palpable and the exhausted civilians no longer even protest. Most of them have come from the slum district of Tshopo, where they found themselves trapped by the violent fighting between the two armies.

Dozens of Deaths

How are we to count the dead and the wounded? The international committee of the Red Cross, which has not yet been able to move towards the hospitals of the town, calculates the civilian casualties number 50 dead and 100 wounded. But to hear the people who have come from Tshopo, the real number is much higher, especially on the level of 5th and 7th streets where they are fighting for the area nearly meter by meter.

Accounts tell of a family being entirely annihilated under the ruins when their house was hit by a shell, of 19 children perishing when their school received a direct hit on the first day. Everyone speaks of a neighbor struck down by an explosion when it hit his tiny parcel of land, of children lost and wandering in the town.

All the Congolese whom we questioned, either on the grounds of the clinic or in the town where the civilians wander like ghosts between the gutted houses, assure us that the dead can be counted by the dozens, that the balance of victims never ceases to increase.

How could it be otherwise? Rwandans and Ugandans are fighting practically street by street, the mortar fire aimed at the town defies all the promises of a cease-fire and, most important, the wounded have virtually no chance of getting out.

We lack everything, repeats Dr. Kornando Cikukho, a gynecologist who has been converted into a war surgeon, medicines, anesthetics, dressings; but also water to clean the place, light to operate correctly.

The Burning Cathedral

The Congolese, not far from believing that they have been abandoned by God and by mankind, never cease to ask what the international community, Belgium, UNO and President Clinton are doing. They believe they see the confirmation of a curse, of which they consider themselves the object, since at the stroke of midnight a carefully aimed shell fell on the roof of the Cathedral of Kisangani, which stands right beside the law courts.

In a few seconds the wooden structure was enveloped in flames and a heavy brown smoke rose from between the metal plates which made up the roof. This burning of the cathedral appeared to be the symbol of the destruction of Kisangani. The bells immediately sounded the call for volunteers to come and help, and the people rushed in from everywhere with metal cans, with buckets, with plastic jerrycans.

The officers of the United Nations Peace Force climbed onto the roof of the building, trying to throw water on the burning woodwork. But the few extinguishers brought over from the nearby law courts didn't work and the buckets of water thrown on the fire were ridiculous before the tenacious fury of the flames...

When a provisional cease-fire was suddenly decreed, Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers could be seen rapidly abandoning their walkie-talkies and rushing towards the burning building. But nothing worked. After a few seconds the human chain of solidarity suddenly started rushing in and out of the flaming structure: it was clearly necessary to get all of the religious objects out of the cathedral. One could then see the statues of saints, the pictures, the chasubles, even the pews and the confessionals, piled up on the lawn while the smoke rose high in the sky, well above the trajectory of the shells...

Hunting for Witnesses

At the end of the day the UN officers were still trying to perform the impossible: to make both parties agree to put an end to their senseless fighting, to open a demilitarized zone - in the middle of which the observers could take up a position with their blue flags and their vehicles marked by the UN symbol - and to finally start the withdrawal of the troops. But their efforts here seemed as ridiculous as their attempts to save the cathedral which only a short time ago had celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its foundation, as ridiculous as reminding the people of the principles of international law... In effect, the military observers have an increasingly distinct feeling that they have been made the target of the two armies, both of whom wish for the departure of outside observers.

They feel this way because the burning of the cathedral, the shells which have systematically destroyed the buildings of the law courts, the blasts which completely destroyed the second building which housed the Peace Force and which by a miracle caused no victims, cannot be interpreted as mere chance.

Everything happened as if the UN was now being dismissed from a town from which God and men of good will had long ago turned their eyes...

From the "Le Soir" Newspaper of Thursday, June 8, 2000