“I felt personally guilty and guilty toward the people I met there,” said Atul Khare, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, who recently visited Luvungi. “They told me, ‘We’ve been raped, we’ve been brutalized, give us peace and security.’ Unfortunately, I said, that is something I cannot promise.”

Within peacekeeping circles, Congo is becoming known as “the African equivalent of Afghanistan,” said Annika Hilding-Norberg, a director at the Peace Operations Training Institute in Virginia, because of the conflict’s enduring violence and complexity.

Luvungi, a village of about 2,000 people, is a crucible where so many of Congo’s intractable problems converged: the scramble for minerals; the fragmentation of rebel groups; the perverse incentives among armed groups to commit atrocities to bolster their negotiating strength; the poverty that keeps villages cut off and incommunicado; and the disturbing fact that in Congo’s wars, the battleground is often women’s bodies. United Nations officials call the sexual violence in Congo the worst in the world.

A sense of menace hangs over this entire area, even the government-controlled outposts.

And people in the Luvungi area are now taking no chances. After the rapes, the United Nations set up a small base here, and just the presence of 20 or so peacekeepers in an abandoned mud-walled cinema draws countless refugees from surrounding areas to camp out at night around them.

During escorted trips to markets, thousands of villagers trudge up the hills behind a handful of Indian peacekeepers in trucks, begging the peacekeepers to drive “pole, pole” — or “slowly, slowly” — so as not to leave the slightest gap or opportunity for armed men to drop down from the jungle wall.

This area is spectacularly rich in gold, tin ore and fertile land, which is partly why it has been so bitterly contested by rebel groups and renegade army divisions. Surging brown rivers slice through the jungle, which is decorated with pink hibiscus flowers and birds of paradise. Rumbling up a road here is like driving through a greenhouse.