Quotes of the Day

Sitting in a straw-walled hut, the young woman whispers her grim tale: as she walked recently near a refugee camp in the village of Dubie in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a government soldier dragged her into a house, tore off her sarong and T shirt, and raped her. Her two-month-old baby, whom she was carrying on her back, tumbled to the ground and lay wailing throughout the attack. "He left me there naked," Ngoza Djoli says, her baby at her breast. Djoli does not know how old she is; she looks about 17. When her husband heard her distraught tale, she says, he said: "What can we do? He is a soldier, and I am a civilian."

Chilling as it is, Djoli's story is a small detail in the epic misery unfolding in Katanga, a province of the D.R.C. that's approximately the size of France and has a population, mostly poor, of 4.1 million. According to U.N. humanitarian officials, some 164,000 people have fled their Katanga homes since late last year, most of them victims of a vicious struggle as government soldiers close in on Katanga's rebel militia groups known as Mai Mai. President Joseph Kabila's transitional coalition — which includes former warlords — is determined to eradicate rebel holdouts before Congo's first free elections in more than 40 years, which are scheduled for June 18. And the repercussions of that campaign — which since last fall has caused around 1,200 deaths a day, mostly from war-related illnesses — are being felt thousands of miles away, as European governments debate how many troops to commit to the region before the election, and what their precise role should be.

For villagers, the Katanga campaign has been calamitous. Flying low over Lake Upemba in northern Katanga in mid-March, hundreds of people could be seen encamped on slivers of dry land in the water, with dugout canoes as their only link to the world. Thousands of others have wandered, sometimes for weeks, across the roadless landscape of forests and waterfalls, finally staggering nearly starved into small towns. There, they tell of Mai Mai fighters placing victims' heads on sticks to proclaim control; of ravenous government soldiers pillaging food stocks; and of each side burning whole villages in retaliation for the locals' suspected support for the enemy. "The rebels took my sister into the forest. I never saw her again," says Kabange Mamitshu, 22, bathing at sunrise in the Congo River. Her brother-in-law went in search of his wife and disappeared too. "We found his body in the forests," Mamitshu says. "The Mai Mai had chopped off his head and taken it." She fled with her husband and three children, taking along her now-orphaned infant niece.

The refugees have found some sanctuary but little food, despite Katanga's innate wealth. Situated right in the center of Africa, the province sits atop giant deposits of copper, cobalt and a good portion of the world's coltan, a rare mineral used in mobile-phone circuitry. Katanga is hugely fertile — it's deep green from the air. "This country could feed all of East Africa and much of southern Africa," says Claude Jibidar, the World Food Program's deputy representative in Congo. But that's small comfort for Dubie's 18,000 refugees. More than 10 die every week from malnutrition, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or msf), the sole relief group in the village. There is a row of freshly dug graves under the trees on the edge of Dubie's biggest refugee camp. "Essentially people are dying of starvation," says Delfin Kapia, a medic for msf, as he struggles to inject antibiotics into a six-month-old boy weighing just 4.6 kg. The following day, Dubie's first food delivery since January arrived. The U.N. truck convoy had taken nearly four weeks to traverse 480 km of dirt track.

Despite the dramatic nature of the crisis, U.N. officials say they face deep skepticism among Western governments in appealing for fresh billions in aid dollars. Congo's conflict has ground on for almost a decade, involving several African armies and leaving nearly 4 million people dead, mostly from disease and starvation. The fighting continues despite an international peace deal and 17,500 U.N. peacekeepers. The force, drawn mainly from Europe and the U.S., is the U.N.'s largest in the world, costing $1.15 billion a year. Yet Time saw no peacekeeper in four days in Katanga. In the village of Mitwaba, a local administrator said about 2,000 Mai Mai guerrillas seem ready to surrender, but fear they'll be slaughtered by government forces without U.N. peacekeepers in place. Rampant military abuses and government bungling have only increased the world's fatigue over Congo. In February, the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization based in Brussels, estimated that about $100 million has vanished from funds — largely donated by West European governments — which were earmarked to pay soldiers in the new Congolese army. Mark Cutts, a U.N. humanitarian official visiting from Geneva, bluntly told Katanga's Vice Governor Tshikez Diemu in a meeting that Time attended in mid-March: "When we appeal to donors, the No. 1 question is, 'What is the government doing?' We cannot do all your work for you."

Western governments are now hoping that the June elections will finally offer "a return on their money," says the World Food Program's Jibidar, perhaps allowing them to decrease enormous aid and peacekeeping expenses for Congo. But Jibidar says he fears possible "all-out war" once the voting ends. Electoral corruption seems likely — in Katanga, at least. Mushimi Bamuleluka, a 33-year-old refugee, says Mai Mai rebels confiscated his three brothers' electoral cards in February, and then killed them all. "They did not want money. They just wanted our [voting] cards," he said. "The Mai Mai tell people, 'If you do not give us your card you will be killed.'"

Such prospects make Western leaders nervous about committing their own troops. In Berlin last week, the Congo election prompted bitter debate when the German government announced it was prepared to dispatch some 500 troops at the head of a proposed 1,500-strong European Union military force in a four-month mission. Supporters of the German coalition government questioned whether such a small number of troops could really make a difference, and warned against mission creep. "The probability that we are not getting out in four months is high," said Johannes Kahrs of the Social Democratic Party, himself a military reservist. But for Europeans who have soured on mass immigration, stabilizing Congo may be preferable to having to cope with thousands trying to escape the fighting. "If we do not succeed, this would result in more waves of refugees [into] Europe and Germany," government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said last week. The Bundestag is expected to approve the troops measure in May.

Europe's parliamentary debates feel a world away from Dubie, where the battle is focused on daily survival rather than on the country's political future. "People want roads reconstructed and land to dig," says Jan Peter Stellema, msf's relief coordinator in Dubie. "That is not much to ask. They are not asking for a TV set." And until roads are built and fields plowed, he hopes enough food will arrive in Dubie. If not, many more graves will soon be dug on the edge of its refugee camp.

• VIVIENNE WALT / Dubie
• In a nation devastated by civil war, imminent elections and E.U. peacekeepers are unlikely to heal the country's wounds