Maisha was caught by a stray bullet on Nov. 5 as rebel fighters led by renegade general Laurent Nkunda clashed with pro-government militias and then executed dozens of civilians, witnesses in the village said.

“My boy is still in the field where they killed him,” said Sinamenye, 51, standing behind a house to avoid a rebel patrol. “It’s not safe for me to go and see him.”

As Sinamenye spoke, thousands of residents of Kiwanja, 75 kilometers (45 miles) north of Goma, the provincial capital, fled. Long lines of people bearing rolled-up mattresses and pots and pans, some with goats in tow, headed south.

For the quarter of a million people displaced in North Kivu since August, the fighting has followed a relentless cycle since the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, when extremist ethnic Hutus slaughtered more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The 1997 end of President Mobutu Sese Seko’s three-decade rule over what was then Zaire, and the current government’s inability to address the strife, has left a hollow state where armed groups stir up ethnic tensions to rally support.

“This killing isn’t new,” said Sinamenye, wearing a soiled white shirt, gray slacks and black rubber flip-flops. “People have been coming here to kill for a long, long time.”

Tutsis, Hutus

The widening of Congo’s ethnic divide testifies to the use of tribal chauvinism by politicians and warlords battling to control a country the size of Western Europe, according to Onesphore Sematumba, a researcher at the Goma-based Pole Institute. “Many people still think of their ethnicity first and then their national identity,” he said.

For Sinamenye, a father of eight, the killing started in 1996, when Tutsi-led fighters from both Congo and Rwanda hacked his neighbors to death with machetes in Ntamugenga, a nearby village he had settled in because of its fertile soil. He fled with his family to Kiwanja, where he farmed beans, corn and peanuts on the outskirts of the town.

An ethnic Hutu, Sinamenye said there is little difference between Nkunda’s fighters and the original rebellion that helped Laurent Kabila, President Joseph Kabila’s father and predecessor, overthrow Mobutu.

Then and Now

“It was Tutsis who attacked us then and it’s Tutsis who are attacking us now,” he said.

Nkunda, who is also a Seventh-Day Adventist lay preacher, led his forces to within 10 kilometers of Goma by Oct. 29. His fighters overwhelmed Congo’s army despite the presence of over 5,000 United Nations peacekeepers in North Kivu. Nkunda, who said in the past that his National Congress for the Defense of the People, or CNDP, was essentially trying to protect his Tutsi minority, now speaks of the “total liberation” of Congo.

“I have national ambitions,” Nkunda, dressed in army fatigues and wielding a cane capped with a silver eagle’s head, said in a Nov. 13 interview near the border with Uganda. “Where we are is the safest in Congo. If we can do that, we are capable of doing it on a national level.”

New York-based Human Rights Watch and witnesses such as Sinamenye dispute Nkunda’s contention and say his soldiers executed tens of civilians in Kiwanja in November.

Conflicting Charges

Congo alleges that Rwanda, whose president, Paul Kagame, had Nkunda in his army, backs him now. Rwanda accuses Congo of being in cahoots with the Hutu militias. Both deny the charges.

Because Rwanda and Congo distrust each other, neither is willing to act against the rebel groups that the other side fears, according to Arthur Kepel, Congo analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

Sinamenye, who grew up herding cattle in Nkunda’s native village of Jomba, says that the violence has shredded relations between Tutsis and other communities in Congo.

“I grew up with Tutsis, we were cow-herders together.” he said. “Now I can’t trust them. Always when they come they just come to kill.” While not all Tutsis agree with Nkunda’s rebellion, many complain of being considered foreigners and the targets of discrimination because they speak Rwanda’s national language. The state has backed several persecutions, they say. Since 1994, Hutu extremist militias that escaped Kagame’s forces by fleeing to Congo have repeatedly attacked and killed Tutsis in both Rwanda and Congo.

Makeshift Tents

Within two days of the fighting for Kiwanja, 5,000 people crowded together in a settlement of makeshift tents made from donated plastic sheeting wedged between a rice paddy and a base of the UN peacekeeping force in the town.

Until a settlement in eastern Congo is reached, farmers such as Sinamenye are too scared to return to their land, where the beans, corn and peanuts they once produced helped North Kivu export produce to the capital, Kinshasa, 1,700 kilometers to the west. Now his seven surviving children go hungry.

Outside his square mud house with a red corrugated iron roof a pot bubbled away as two of Sinamenye’s children played in the dust. His wife was away looking for food.

“We eat roots now,” he said. “They are for pigs, but we have to eat them.”

Sinamenye said he doesn’t know when he will be able to walk the roughly 10 kilometers to retrieve the body of Maisha, whom he described as a bright boy and eager learner, and bury him.

“There were so many people who were killed,” Sinamenye said. “I can’t go over there and risk my life.”