One year before Maria lost her arm, 23-year-old Chantal Tsesi woke to the sound of pre-dawn gunfire. Soldiers marched into her home carrying machetes and told her exactly what they were going to do. "Today we are going to cut off your arm," one of them said. She feared for her six-year-old son, the only other person with her in the house. "They cut off my arm," Tsesi told The UK Independent's Eliza Griswold in 2004. "They cooked it, while they were drinking our mandro [traditional beer], and ate it with the rest of the beans and rice." She added, "They told me they were going to find my husband and eat his heart."

Later, while Tsesi was in the hospital, soldiers returned to her village. They stormed her mother's house, where Tsesi's sister Georgette also lived with her own four children. "We had a shed and they tore it down to build the fire. They took our food and cooked pieces of Georgette and the children," Tsesi recalled. Everyone in the house was killed.

The Ituri conflict "saw some of the most brutal and inhumane fighting of all the Congo wars, and 2003 was a time when that crisis was at its peak," Laura Seay, a U.S. academic with deep experience in Central Africa, told me over email. "It has since ended, and a woman in Ituri today is significantly less likely to experience this type of violence, although certainly the risk is there as the issues underlying the crisis (namely, land rights) have never been resolved."



A 2003 investigation by Human Rights Watch found a trend of rebel groups using cannibalism "to bring ritual strength to perpetrators and to inspire terror in opponents." Breaking that taboo of eating human flesh was a way both to indoctrinate fighters -- getting them to cross a psychological line, making them more willing to follow orders that would otherwise be unthinkable -- and to intimidate opponents and civilians, who might have come to view mere death as so commonplace that something more horrific was needed to coerce them.

It's still not entirely clear how this practice began in Ituri. Human Rights Watch traced it back to 1999, when fighting there began between tribal groups that Belgian colonists had pitted against one another as a means of controlling them. A Congolese bishop named Melchisedec Sikuli Paluku was one of the first to alert the larger world, broadcasting the story of a man who'd been forced to watch his extended family butchered and prepared for consumption. Bishop Paluku told Griswold he thinks it might have began with the routine mutilation of civilians, an earlier tactic to terrorize local communities. "Bemba's men were cutting fingers and ears off," he said, referencing prominent militia leader Jean-Pierre Bemba. "That was normal. But when they started feeding them to the prisoners - that was something new." Bemba went on to become Democratic Republic of Congo vice president from 2003 to 2006 and was arrested on International Criminal Court charges in 2008. He is currently on trial.