Villagers and aid workers in the Kivu provinces of Congo describe a land where death waits in the fields and forests

It is almost dusk and shadows darken the long dirt road that runs between Beni, in Congo's North Kivu province, and the border town of Kasindi, on the Ugandan frontier. Women doing the daily wash in a nearby stream pile their garments into baskets. Standing among banana trees outside a mud hut not far from the road, a small, naked child watches silently as a Land Cruiser rattles by.

Then, out of the gloom, rise three ghostly figures, unmoving, stunted, wrapped in army fatigues, helmets clamped down hard over expressionless faces. For a moment, this dusty trio seems to leer menacingly at the passing traveller.

As they come into focus, it's clear these are no apocalyptic spectres presaging a hellish descent into darkness, but scarecrow dummies left behind by departing Congolese army troops who once camped here – a sort of Three Stooges done out in khaki.

Perhaps the display is meant as a joke. But it also conveys a sinister warning: this is Congo. Nothing is entirely understood. Make no assumptions. Anything can happen. Truth is divisible.

Sure enough, an hour and a half later, a lorry that has gambled by taking the Beni-Kasindi road after dark is held up by 18 armed men who emerge like wraiths out of the dense jungle. The lorry is ransacked, all its goods stolen. The driver is lucky, he escapes with his life – but not his wallet.

It's the sort of hard lesson the UN and numerous international aid organisations and private NGOs have taken to heart as they struggle, year after relentless year, to keep a lid on the huge, ongoing humanitarian and developmental crisis that is eastern Congo.

Africa's "great war", which centred on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and killed an estimated 5 million people, ended in 2003. Here, it did not ever quite stop.

Nearly 10 years on, more than 2 million people are displaced or living as refugees abroad. Millions more are in need of food, clean water, sanitation and healthcare, aided by charities such as Oxfam and Merlin. Present-day emergencies constantly undermine longer-term development projects.

Around eastern Congo's hapless inhabitants, among them, and preying upon them, are myriad armed groups, some foreign, such as the Rwandan Hutu FDLR and the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army, some home-grown – the so-called Mai-Mai.

Also feeding off the civilian population, as the fancy takes it, is the Congolese army, the FARDC – often badly trained and ill-disciplined, habitually unpaid, politically and ethnically divided, and chronically abusive.

International notoriety



Eastern Congo, largely comprising the provinces of South and North Kivu, has become internationally notorious for atrocities, mass rapes and other forms of sexual violence against both women and men, child soldiers, child labour and prostitution, abductions, extortion, illegal mining, exploitation and official corruption on an industrial scale.

Government authority is all but nonexistent. Too often, the law of the jungle rules the jungle, and main force is all.

Latest reports say 12,000 people were displaced by military clashes last week in North Kivu. Musaba (not his full name), who lives in a village near Beni, said instances of sexual violence were increasing. "We have had seven cases of rape. People go to the fields, they go to the forests, and they are attacked. We don't know who is doing this. They are soldiers doing it. That is all we know."

A local doctor (who asked not to be named, for fear of reprisals) gave more details: "People are frightened to go to the fields, so they are not producing, so they have nothing to eat. Many people have been killed just trying to harvest the food. In our area, 100 have been killed since 2010." The army and the police did nothing to help, he said, and sometimes colluded with armed raiders. "No one is ever punished."

Adolphe, another villager who advises the local protection committee, a self-help group funded by Oxfam, said the arrival of internally displaced people (IDPs) was placing strains on the community. "As refugees, these people have different requirements, they have different needs. They don't have any health assistance or place to live. We try to help them integrate and tell our people that they are not a threat."

Asked for a response, an army spokesman said: "Our only wish is that the population live in peace. There are many criminal groups [in eastern Congo], there are many demobilised soldiers, the civilian population has a lot of arms. These people say the army is responsible for attacks. But maybe it is they who are doing these things."

The UN mission here, known as Monusco, is the biggest and most expensive of its kind in the world – about 20,000 personnel, 17,000 of them soldiers, at an annual cost of $1.5bn (£900m) – complemented, in theory at least, by the UN relief agencies and leading international NGOs such as Oxfam.

Monusco's decision to throw its weight and its troops behind the latest "Perfect Peace" offensive launched by government forces against the FDLR in North and South Kivu is controversial. But it is justified in terms of the Congo's harsh reality, as acted out on the Beni-Kasindi road.

"In 2011, the armed groups started reoccupying territory vacated by the army when it withdrew for retraining and integration of the CNDP [an indigenous Rwandophone militia previously in revolt against the government]," said a senior UN official in Goma, capital of North Kivu.

"Now the army is taking them back. The FDLR has lost several top commanders in recent months. It's weaker than before. We expect to finish them off in the next two years."

The downside, the official added, was that new instability would create a new surge of IDPs and was encouraging the formation of additional Congolese armed militias.

Acceptable cost



It was also likely to hamper UN-backed efforts to regulate the mining of eastern Congo's precious metals and minerals – the root cause, along with land disputes, of much of the friction in the area – and exacerbate food shortages, he admitted. At present many farmers cannot access their fields for fear of violence. But this, the official suggested, was an acceptable cost for finishing off the rebels.

Monusco's readiness to back the Congolese army has been attributed in some quarters to pressure last year from the government of President Joseph Kabila for a reduction of the UN mission, preparatory to departure.

In return for being allowed to stay, the mission was rebranded a "stabilisation" rather than a peacekeeping operation. It subsequently agreed to further boost state authority by backing the new offensive.

The Kabila regime's appalling human rights record, endemic corruption, and the army's long record of serious abuses have led human rights supporters to question the UN's cosy relationship with Kinshasa. Such criticism has intensified since last November's presidential election, which Kabila won amid widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

Monusco's defenders respond by pointing to new mechanisms intended to screen out army personnel responsible for past abuses and by making UN operational assistance conditional on certain standards of conduct being met.

Speaking last month, Hervé Ladsous, the head of UN peacekeeping operations, said it was essential that Monusco continues to work closely with the Congolese authorities in order to facilitate the next round of provincial and local elections (which have been postponed after last November's upheavals).

Monusco's role was to "satisfy the Congolese political actors, contribute to dialogue and the opening of the political space", Ladsous said, apparently brushing aside opposition concerns about government repression.

Valerien Ilombe, the secretary-general of Apide, an NGO that promotes indigenous development initiatives from its base in Goma, said army's new push would increase insecurity among people who already had very little. "People generally are very poor. The majority lives on under $1 a day. Everything they consume comes from outside the country. They cannot sustain themselves due to the insecurity."

All the same, Ilombe added, a certain amount of displacement should be tolerated. "It's inevitable and necessary. You have to look at the end goal – of getting rid of the armed groups."

Aid agencies do not hide their concerns that the UN policy of getting into bed with Kabila's government could backfire, as in 2009 when similar UN-backed army offensives were linked to 1,000 civilian deaths, mass rapes and the displacement of 800,000 people. They say creating more instability to end instability is nonsensical.

"In Congo, you always have a tendency to think you are on the brink of disaster. But since November we have seen a really sharp deterioration in the security situation," said a long-serving aid worker in Goma.

"The spreading influence of Rwandophone groups [principally through the integration into the army of the CNDP] has alienated large sections of the population ... the government continues to do very little. Everybody is pursuing his own ends ...

"The UN's approach [of backing the army] is very compromising. It is playing a balancing game. The drawdown is suspended, they get to stay in the country, and this is the price you pay. The UN has got embroiled in Congo's politics at a very high level."

Domestic opponents of the Kabila regime also point to ongoing suppression of dissent, harassment and surveillance of civil rights organisations, the arrest of political activists, the intimidation of journalists and the harbouring of Bosco Ntaganda, a war crimes suspect sought by the international criminal court (all documented by Human Rights Watch), as evidence that the UN is unwisely turning a blind eye to serious abuses – and is acting in contravention of its own charter.

UN's basic principles



According to UN rules, missions sent abroad should abide by "three basic principles" of peacekeeping: consent of the parties, impartiality, and non-use of force except in self-defence and defence of the mandate. Even when a mission is authorised to use "all necessary means" to achieve its objectives, as is the case with Monusco, the rules state that "a UN peacekeeping operation should only use force as a measure of last resort".

This injunction will almost certainly not be adhered to in the Kivus as Operation Perfect Peace rolls out. But the fudging of Monusco's mandate may help deflect criticism. As a Bukavu aid consultant noted, nobody really knows what "stabilisation" actually entails.

By collaborating with the Kabila government, Monusco is following the example of most western governments. Although the US state department and others protested over last November's electoral shenanigans, they have maintained relations with Kabila. One observer in Goma noted this is the same "devil you know" approach that kept Congo's former dictator, Seso Seko Mobutu, in power with western backing during the cold war (when he renamed the country Zaire).

The price paid by eastern Congo's long-suffering civilian population for this high-level collusion continues to mount. Speaking on condition of anonymity (he said he would certainly be killed if his identity was revealed), a senior public health official in North Kivu pointed to a rapidly deteriorating health situation caused by misgovernance and mounting insecurity.

The official said: "People live off their fields, but they are not producing because of the security situation. They cannot tend their fields, so they have nothing to eat. People are trying to harvest their food, they go to the forest and they disappear, they are killed. So malnutrition is increasing year by year. Malaria and gastroenteritis and upper respiratory diseases, anaemia, they are all increasing.

"The FARDC has been paid off for years, they are living off the population. They work together with the bandits to raid the people. The police are not helping, the government are not helping, the UN is not really helping ... We are becoming more and more dependent on outside donors. Everyone knows this is true but no one can say it."