Goma, Catastrophe Central

From her two-room shack on a green hilltop here, Miriam Makezi had a front row seat in recent years at an evolving spectacle of human misery.

The display began in 1994, when Makezi’s hometown was overrun by more than 1 million Rwandan refugees. Many were Hutu extremists who over a period of 100 days had hacked to death more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dumping bodies in nearby rivers and lakes.

In Goma’s refugee camps, unsanitary conditions spawned a cholera epidemic that wiped out about 12,000 people, including some of Makezi’s neighbors.

For the next eight years, this eastern Congo city along the Rwandan border was conflict central. Rebel armies recruited young men and children to fight in a Congolese war that so far has claimed more than 2 million lives, according to United Nations estimates.

Then last month, Mt. Nyiragongo, a volcano looming over this lakeside city, spewed torrents of lava that swallowed half of Goma, destroying tens of thousands of homes. Makezi’s house was drowned in lava. She and hundreds of thousands became homeless, the victims of Goma’s latest disaster.

“The volcano destroyed what the war left standing,” Makezi said. “It took everything we had. But soon this too will be over. We survived.”

If Goma is the symbol for the crises that plague Africa, its people are the embodiment of human resilience, persevering in the face of war, disease, hunger and natural disasters.

“Their threshold for suffering is so much higher than people who haven’t lived through this unbelievable series of catastrophes,” said Paul Stromberg, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which has maintained an outpost here since 1994. “You have to wonder: How much more can this city take?”

Jacques Verheyden, a Belgian priest who has lived here for five years, stood in his parish yard on a recent evening and surveyed the thousands of people who had assembled that morning to wait for food and water from relief workers. Many said they had not eaten in four days. Now it was getting dark, and with no sign of help, the crowd slowly began to leave.

Few complained or showed anger at church officials who had promised food and water. Emotions waste energy, and on this day Gomans needed every ounce to survive.

“They accept that they have to help themselves,” said the priest. “They’ve learned that if they rely solely on others, they’re not going to make it.”

He paused, then added: “The Scriptures say that God will only give you so much [adversity] that you can bear. Well, Goma has had [its] share, then some more.”

Makezi, 38, left the food line and headed for her former neighborhood. She and her seven children planned to spend the night with a neighbor whose house was spared by the lava. Makezi still didn’t know how she was going to feed her young ones.

“It’s God’s will,” she said about the food trucks not showing up. “Maybe they’ll come tomorrow.”

Goma is located on the sandy shores of Lake Kivu in Africa’s Great Lakes region. Place the city beside the Pacific Ocean and it might resemble Malibu, with steep, green hills cascading to sparkling blue waters.

Before it became known as the capital of catastrophe, Goma enjoyed a reputation as a playground for the Belgian colonists who ruled Congo. In the 1950s, shops here were stocked with Parisian food, wine and clothes for Belgians who packed the resorts and Art Deco homes around Lake Kivu.

Gomans, who worked as servants for the Belgians and were treated as second-class citizens, did not fare better after independence.

Mobutu Sese Seko, who seized power in 1965 and ruled Congo for 32 years, built a summer palace here after falling in love with Goma’s cool climate--the year-round average temperature is 59 degrees--and the nearly mile-high altitude. Mobutu would take his friends, including South African apartheid-era President Pieter W. Botha, to see hippopotamuses, exotic birds and rare mountain gorillas in nearby Virunga National Park.

But Mobutu neglected the city’s development. The only well-paved road was a 200-yard stretch in front of his lakefront home.

Taxes from the diamonds, coltan (an ore used to make electronic equipment) and other precious minerals mined in the area went to Mobutu and his cronies, not to provide services for the people. The few Gomans who could afford to make an international telephone call had to bribe Mobutu’s guards to use the presidential line.

Gomans agree that the history of the city--and the entire Great Lakes region--was changed in 1994 by the Rwandan genocide. Rwandan Hutus fled to Goma to escape retribution for the killing of minority Tutsis, in massacres organized by an extremist Hutu government and its proxy army, the Interahamwe militia.

Goma became the headquarters for Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila, whose forces occupied the city in 1996. A new, Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government attacked Goma’s refugee camps later that year to drive out militiamen who were living among the refugees.

Goma seemed set to benefit the next year when Kabila’s army marched to Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, and ousted Mobutu. But relations soon soured between Kabila and his supporters in the Rwandan government, who helped the Tutsi-dominated rebels of the Congolese Rally for Democracy, known as the RCD, take control of the town.

Living conditions for Gomans have deteriorated under the RCD. Thousands of municipal workers haven’t been paid in years. Francois Nzabara, Goma’s rebel-selected mayor, acknowledges that he has little power to improve conditions.

“What’s the mayor’s job?” a visitor recently inquired. “To receive complaints from residents,” Nzabara replied. But five days after Mt. Nyiragongo devastated Goma, no one was lined up at the mayor’s office to ask for help.

Mitima Mvonabandi, a tax collector, said that though he had not received his wages, he remained on the job so that he could trade favors with businesspeople. “Many of them don’t declare the full value of their goods,” he said. “I don’t tell the RCD, and they help me feed my six children. It’s a fair trade.”

Several merchants said they buy protection for their businesses from RCD commanders and their Rwandan backers. But most Gomans cannot afford such services, and many parents urge their sons to join the RCD to provide some security for the family.

The fact that about 300,000 Gomans returned to their hometown three days after fleeing the eruption showed their level of desperation--and poverty.

Makezi’s neighbor Jean-Paul Kisanga endured walking atop a quarter of a mile of still-smoldering lava to reclaim his meager possessions: a couple of mattresses, a few pots and pans, and some tattered clothes.

For the last several months, Kisanga, an unemployed mechanic, has fed his family with maize, bananas and spinach from a small plot near the airport. He traded some bananas for a neighbor’s potatoes.

Mt. Nyiragongo destroyed the airport and Kisanga’s garden. Recently the family has had to rely on rations of cooking oil, flour and high-protein biscuits from the U.N. World Food Program.

In a few days, relief agencies that deal with immediate emergencies plan to pack up and leave the city.

Gomans, however, face another dire prediction. An Italian volcanologist hired by the United Nations to inspect Mt. Nyiragongo has warned that its recent activity created fissures extending just over a mile from the city. The next eruption could bury the town, he warned.

Unshaken, residents went about their business as usual.