DR CONGO: The UN is trying to put together a French-led peacekeeping force for Congo. Declan Walsh recently went to the eastern area of the country, where one of the local generals explains why he keeps fighting.
An empty church nestles deep inside eastern Congo's war-pocked hills.
Inside, a whiskery old warrior is giving a rare audience to explain, among other things, why he is invincible to gunfire. "I am a Mayi Mayi general so I carry the gris-gris \," proudly declares Gen Jeannot Ruharara, a wooden staff in one hand, a mobile phone in the other. "They protect against snakes, lightening, disappearance - and of course bullets." The tools of this great magic are pinned to the General's chest like a row of war medals. It is a selection worthy of a Shakespearean cauldron - tail of buffalo, claw of eagle, horn of antelope, cola nuts, dirty feathers, plastic beads and an old revolver. Reaching into the hairy confusion, the General pulls out a small, dark phial. He pauses solemnly, and for a moment the only sound is the frantic scribbling of his personal secretary, a neatly pressed young man on the pew behind.
"This," he says, "is the maji." The maji - the Swahili word for water - has been mystically blessed at a secret mountain ceremony. It will be sprinkled on his troops before entering battle, he says; afterwards enemy bullets cannot hurt them. He knows, it has saved his skin many times. His weather-beaten features cracked into a smile.
"Even shells and rockets, they cannot kill me," he chuckles.
But there is writing in English on the cap of the mysterious bottle. I carefully pull forward. It reads: "Boots Pharmaceuticals".
Of all the gun-toting groups roaming the Democratic Republic of Congo, few are as enigmatic as the Mayi-Mayi. There is no guiding leader, no command structure and no good estimate of their numbers. Instead the movement is a vaguely connected patchwork of factions, headed by a clutch of self-styled "generals" and scattered over a lawless vastness bigger than Britain and Ireland.
Their roots stretch back to the late 19th century, when Belgium's King Leopold carved the Congo from an ocean of African jungle and claimed it as his personal dominion. His rapacious ways (in particular his ruthless rubber plantations) sparked an armed uprising from local tribal warriors in the east. But it failed, miserably. Half a century later the tribesmen rose again, this time against a local-born thief named Mobutu Sese Seko, who had just seized power in the post-independence flux. Inspired by other nationalist movements in east Africa - most notably Kenya's Mau Mau - the Mayi-Mayi was born.
Today the warriors are fighting again, at the heart of Africa's most terrible war. This time the enemy is Rwanda, Congo's tiny eastern neighbour which sparked the fighting in 1998, and its Congolese puppet army, the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebels. After four years of gargantuan destruction and unspeakable cruelty, many ordinary Congolese are nakedly hostile to their pro-Rwandan "liberators". And so the Mayi Mayi, mostly village lads armed with ancient AK-47 guns, have, in some areas, come to enjoy a popularity akin to that of the French resistance to Nazi Germany.
"The aggressors have come to destroy our country," says Gen Ruharara during our meeting in Ndolera, a village of 6,000 on the edge of his mountain demesne. "We are here to fight them."
At 55, Gen Ruharara is one of the original Mayi Mayi. He controls a slice of highland perched above the Ruzizi Plain, a bandit-prone stretch by the Burundi border. I have been brought to meet him by Jean Marie, his ever-cheerful "public relations" officer.
We first meet in the offices of the RCD, the Mayi Mayi's sworn enemy, in the provincial capital. It is a typically Congolese moment. I am looking for an interview; Jean Marie mutters something about a negotiation mission. Later, in a downtown bar, he offers to take me to his leader. Our clandestine trip will take just two days return, he promises breezily. Security is "100 per cent guaranteed".
It turns out to be a wildly optimistic estimate. The General fails to show at the first rendezvous, a half-deserted village, because, as it turns out, it was the scene of a shoot-out between rival factions just one day earlier. Our frightened driver bolts back to Bukavu. Jean Marie is arrested after an afternoon's drinking and interrogated for several hours.
Finally, four days later, we reach the General by sneaking around RCD checkpoints, wading through waist-deep streams and slinking through banana plantations. Startled peasants are told the strange white man is an Italian priest. We are to return by foot, bicycle and bus. Tempers fray. But when we arrive at Ndolera, the General, who has never been interviewed before, appears delighted and ushers us into the deserted church. It turns out he learned his soldiering at the hands of another, rather more famous, revolutionary.
"Ah yes, Ernesto Che Guevara, that was him," he said, smiling at the recollection. "We used to call him Ernesto. A giant of a man. Big, thick hair. Smoked a lot."
In 1964, Guevara led a secret expeditionary force of 100 Cuban commandos to eastern Congo to boost the socialist revolution against Mobutu. It was a short-lived disaster. After just seven months, the cigar-chomping guerrilla withdrew in bitter disappointment. "They lack revolutionary awareness," he wrote of his Congolese cadres in a diary published just two years ago.
"Corrupted by inactivity, saturated with fetishistic notions, devoid of any coherent political education - all these traits make the soldier of the Congolese revolution the poorest example of a fighter that I have ever come across."
Guevara was particularly disgusted with a barrel-bellied boozer and womaniser named Laurent Kabila who, 30 years later, would become Congo's president.
Gen Ruharara, then a 17-year-old sergeant, trained at the Cubans' lakeside base in Kibamba. He remembers it as a rather more glorious time.
"Guevara taught us a lot. He gave us the patriotic spirit we fight with today," he says. "We hope he can come back to help us some day."
I suggest gingerly this may be difficult since Guevara died 35 years ago. The General arches an eyebrow, then dismisses the news with a nonchalant shrug. "I have been living and fighting in the bush since then," he says, "Who was going to tell me?"
In this war, the Mayi Mayi have been supported by the Kinshasa government led by Kabila's son, Joseph. But like much in this giant and chaotic nation, even covert patronage can go wrong. Two years ago Kinshasa airdropped several sacks full of money, explains Jean Marie. But inside were stacks of bank notes printed in the government-controlled west but illegal in the rebel-held east. "Some people tried to spend it but got arrested. We had to throw the lot away," he said disgustedly.
The war has inspired awesome savagery. A recent UN report found gruesome evidence of cannibalism in the northeastern province of Ituri. RCD soldiers have become notorious for robbery and rape but so have some Mayi Mayi. One faction near the town of Shabunda became notorious for mass rape, other groups use the Mayi Mayi name as a cover for heartless banditry.
Many Mayi Mayi fight alongside the Interahamwe, the vicious Rwandan killers who led the 1994 genocide. And behind their ostensibly noble nationalism lies a current of ugly chauvinism. Some leaders have used the war to stir up an old dispute with Congolese Tutsis. The International Crisis Group, a respected think-tank, describes it as a "reckless incitement".
Yet respect for the Mayi Mayi is also swelling. When the RCD controlled Ndolera, they pillaged everything, says headmaster Narushisha Munigwa. "They even pulled the wooden benches from the school and used them to roast a stolen goat". But since the Mayi Mayi took control last year, villagers pay a tax of food and some money, but there are no abuses. "We are breathing because of these people," he says.
In October, once rival Mayi Mayi factions formed a fighting coalition to take Uvira, a strategic lakeside town. An armed Tutsi group also tagged along. They held Uvira for just a week, but long enough to send a strong signal about their combined force. As in Ndolera, townspeople said there were few human rights abuses during their stay.
More recently, the commander of the biggest faction, Joseph Padiri, has started helping the UN demobilise Rwandan Hutu fighters on his turf, including the Interahamwe militia that led the 1994 genocide.
Untangling the mess of eastern Congo is essential, the ICG recently warned, otherwise the widely touted peace deals "will remain never-implemented words on paper". And for the region's battered civilians, over two million of whom have died as a result of the war, peace will remain as elusive as ever.
Meanwhile back in Ndolera, there was one outstanding matter. I had been promised ultimate proof of Gen Ruharara's maji - a goat would be blessed, troops would open fire upon it and lo, the animal would live.
Alas, on the day the great test was not possible - for technical reasons.
"The gunfire could alert the enemy and bring him towards us," Gen Ruharara offered in a half-apology.
His whiskers curled into that knowing smile again. The goat was safe, and so was the Mayi Mayi myth.