The task of the UN-authorised force is enormous in a region where themachete has become a weapon of mass destruction, writes Declan Walshin Bunia
The French fighter jets roared low over Bunia's sea of ramshackle tin roofs. On the rutted dirt streets below, startled townspeople craned their necks up. Some were awed, others terrified. In the squalid refugee camp by the United Nations base, a dozen people collapsed and had to be hospitalised.
At the airport, military cargo planes were disgorging hundreds of muscular French soldiers on to the pocked tarmac.
Towards town, they started to erect checkpoints at the sites of some of last month's massacres. Ragged local militia, piled into pick-ups and swinging AK-47 guns, looked on uneasily.
The 1,400-strong European intervention force that began deploying in north-eastern Congo this week is tasked with staunching four years of terrible bloodletting. Among desperate locals, expectations are high. Cries of "libere!" (freed) rang out as the first troops arrived.
At the makeshift hospital, Nurse Damien Rukwiza wrapped a fresh bandage on a teenage girl's machete wound. "We need a powerful force to secure us," he said. "Otherwise we will continue to live in fear."
For once it seems the West cares about Congo, where over 3.3 million people have perished since war exploded in 1998 - the world's bloodiest conflict since the second World War. But the mission is fraught with peril and uncertainty.
Will the force, as many hope, be a crucial first step towards bringing peace to the bedevilled region? Or will it, as others fear, merely slow the bloodshed but fail to stop it?
Codenamed Operation Artemis, France is leading the deployment in an effort to re-establish its influence in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
Britain, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Sweden and South Africa are sending support troops. Their task is immense. Of the many regional mini-wars wrenching Congo apart, none is as hate-filled, or brutal, as that of Ituri.
Across the gold-rich region, at least 50,000 people have been killed and 500,000 displaced since fighting broke out between ethnic Hema and Lendu militiamen.
Entire villages have been razed, mothers and children slit open, hospital patients slaughtered in their bed. Some victims are gruesomely mutilated, others cannibalised. The machete has become a weapon of mass destruction.
In Bunia, on the streets below the screaming Mirage jets, over 500 people have been slaughtered in the past month alone. By the standards of Ituri the killing, perpetrated by both Hema and Lendu fighters, was unexceptional save for one fact: it took place within sight of 700 armed UN troops. As the cries rang out around them, Uruguayan troops cowered inside their base, following the orders of their pitifully inadequate mandate.
The new force, authorised by the UN but sent by the European Union, has more muscular orders. Its mission is to bring peace to Bunia town, using deadly force if necessary. They will have to work quickly - the deployment runs until September 1st, when it will hand over to 3,000 or more Bangladeshi soldiers.
A taste of the potential danger came last Saturday, just one day after the first French Special Forces landed. Gunfire and shells rocked Bunia as Lendu fighters launched a fearsome attack to recapture the town.
Foreign journalists ran to the UN compound, where stray bullets zinged through the rear fence, injuring at least two sheltering townspeople. The French, who had less than 100 troops in place, stayed at base.
Since then Bunia has been calm but tense because of fears of another Lendu attack and a nightly drip of assassinations. A hospital nurse, who is neither Hema nor Lendu, was abducted and strangled to death on Thursday, the 14th such disappearance in five days.
The French say they will not attempt to disarm the local Hema militia, which are supposed to canton in quarters surrounding the town. Nevertheless, securing such a limited area may not be too difficult. And it may also allow the Ituri Pacification Committee, an inter-ethnic administration sent into hiding by the fighting, a chance to assert its authority and promote dialogue between the warring militias.
Equally, however, the killing may be merely moved into the surrounding countryside, where even worse atrocities have taken place - and the French force says it will not venture.
Muhito Tibasima, a 26-year-old mother of two, is pinned to a bed in Bunia's dilapidated general hospital. Last September, she was caught in Nyankunde, 25 miles to the north, when Lendu fighters took control. In the wave of butchery that followed, over 1,200 people died. It became one of the worst atrocities of the entire war.
Over one nightmarish week Muhito, who is paralysed from the waist down, watched in horror as Lendu militiamen stormed into the hospital, murdering dozens of patients in their beds. They despatched the young boy next to her with a series of machete blows to the head.
"They told me I was next. They joked that because I was paralysed they couldn't kill me like that - they would bury me alive," she says. Lucky to have escaped, she struggles to explain such cruelty.
"It can only be Satan that has come to sow hate in people's hearts," she said.
The massacres are continuing. According to Amnesty International, reliable reports are emerging of "several hundred" deaths in Tchomia, on the shores of Lake Albert, and of at least 100 more in Katoto, to the north. Both towns are within 20 miles of Bunia. But yesterday, French Gen Bruno Neveux said his troops would not be going there.
"[Our mission\] . . . is clearly confined to Bunia city and airport and the two refugee camps near the airport," he told reporters in Brussels.
Ireland will have a token involvement in the force. Under current plans, four officers may be deployed to command centres in Paris and Entebbe airport in Uganda. But human rights activists say Ireland could be more effective through diplomacy.
Ruthless manipulation from neighbouring Uganda, which occupied Ituri until last month, has propelled a simmering enmity between Hema and Lendu into full-scale war. Ugandan officers armed both sides to secure access to the region's fabulous gold, diamonds and timber reserves. Those implicated go as high as the recently dismissed army chief of staff, James Kazini, and President Yoweri Museveni's brother, Salim Saleh.
According to Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch countries such as Ireland, which is giving €32 million in aid this year, should be leveraging its influence to stop the flow of arms.
An Irish aid official in Uganda admitted Congo had been a "complicating factor", but one on which donors had "remained engaged".
Limited as it may be, the EU deployment is been rapturously welcomed in Bunia. In the coming months the mission may allow Lendu civilians, tens of thousands of whom have fled, to return home in safety.
But the crunch is likely to come in mid-August, when the mission is due to start pulling out. If the incoming Bangladeshi force does not have a robust mandate, it will be as helpless to prevent a return to slaughter as the Uruguayans were last month. And the EU force, if it goes, may be judged to have facilitated nothing more than a mere pause in hostilities.
In the longer term, the only solution to Congo's torturously complicated war seems to be a full-blown armed UN deployment across the giant country. Months ago that would have seemed an impossible proposition.
Now, since Ituria's massacres shot Congo back to centre stage, there is at least a glimmer of hope.