"This camp is like a jail," a young woman added.

"We have a democratic ideology," Mbonimpa told me. "You can see that other political parties are not disturbed in this area. People can say what they want without any problem. Even international organizations go wherever they want to."

The space for political and civic action in the DRC has been so distorted by 80 years of Belgian colonization, 50 years of dictatorship, and 20 years of conflict that this kind of nonsensical politics is virtually all that remains. M23's rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism consists of fake offices with hanging portraits of a fake president, or militants complaining about the government's failure to restrain the growth of militant groups, or Indian peacekeepers driving tanks that they'll never use, and which are useless anyway -- the conflict survives because it generates such absurdities while muzzling any real alternative to them. And even extreme alternatives, like the UN intervention brigade, might not be enough to end it for good.

The recent peace effort, a new UN Great Lakes envoy, and the MONUSCO intervention force all mean that a resolution could be closer than it appears. But the logic of conflict must first be broken at ground level, and peace, when it comes, will be a local accomplishment. At the moment, the country lives only in the minds of its citizens: the best doctors, teachers and engineers all work for NGOs. Oxfam provides water for over 200,000 people in North Kivu alone, and the Catholic Church operates over 650 schools nationwide -- NGOs and religious organizations have supplanted the core services of the state. In the east, the state has been whittled down to a currency no one uses, and to uniforms that no one trusts. The idea of a Congolese polity has become fatally abstracted: The state had given up on local-level engagement and institution building and retreated to a distant capital. "This fragmentation," one Goma-based expert told me, "lack of communal dialogue, and lack of engagement in the political process means that everything is centralized in Kinshasa, that corrupt people are lining their pockets, and that people on the ground are resolving their problems with the only means they have, which is through arms."

A solution is beyond the purview of armies or politicians. A future peace likely rests in those quantum-level pockets of conflict that stain the region -- through the exhausting and unglamorous business of resolving local-level disputes, through reconciling feuding communities and rebuilding a broken polity. When peace arrives, there will likely be grand bargains between powerful enemies -- the Rwandans will have to be secure in the knowledge that they have nothing to gain from meddling, and the Congolese government will have to be strong enough to take control of the entire country. But the solution isn't photogenic or even particularly exciting: it lies in teachers deciding not to become warlords, in the honesty of traffic cops, in citizens beginning to live in an environment where the gun is no longer the surest or most logical means of getting what they want.

War, like any political order, is a constructed thing. It's human. No natural law commands it, and there's nothing about it that's immutable or permanent. Conflict isn't wired into the organs or the bones, and there is a covert bigotry to the idea that war is the only possible destiny for certain people in certain places, or to the notion that there are societies incapable of breaking out of their own deadly logic of conflict. However enormous it may seem, the conflict in DRC is as inevitable as any other. There is nothing inevitable about it.

On the road to Kitchanga, the rear wheels of trucks slid in the earth as if driving on ice. In a single five-kilometer span, we passed an over-laden pickup buried to the grille in a dirt crater, a second broken-down truck with its payload and passengers huddled by the side of the road with no obvious means of rescue, and another truck tugging a car from a dust trap with a fraying rope. Even the vehicles that were surviving the journey were bruised and belching hulks, their chassis rattling and their rusted tailpipes wheezing thick smog. The traffic on the road was heavy and slow -- James said that drivers now feared the taxation that M23 imposed on commercial trucks, and preferred to take their chances with the Kitchanga route if they had to drive to the Ugandan border. But the road can barely accommodate one truck at a time. Passage of two-way traffic was a skilled negotiation, a dialogue of monsters inching backwards and forwards, then honking in greeting or warning, then tacitly agreeing to a tiny leeway buffered with a mountain-sized drop, then huffing in opposite directions billowed in clouds of dust and exhaust.

More certain of their passage are the motorbikes and bicycles, the latter of which are usualy piled high with bushels of charcoal, and then slowly wheeled to Goma, 20 or 30 miles to the southwest. This was a lucrative enterprise, James said: FARDC soldiers, who were barely paid or fed and who live in roadside bases that looked like refugee camps, pillage local forests and sell charcoal and timber to the bicycle men, who then sell their wares in Goma at a markup. But I'd spent the morning watching men push bicycles in the hot sun, with the city still hours or even days in the distance. I'd seen their vehicles propped up with logs by the side of the highway, their minders crouched in the shade of their heavy payload, looking as if mere survival were exacting an impossible price.

In a nondescript single-story building in Kitchanga, we met a nervous local administrator who locked his office door while he was speaking with me and refused to tell me his name. The terror that had gripped Kitchanga in February still hadn't lifted, and his account was tinged with a certain anti-Tutsi bias. He spoke of the "Rutshuru" side of town, infiltrated by seditious Tutsis who he believed were in league with M23, and the "Masisi" side inhabited by Hutu and Hunde. He gave his accounting of events: "The APCLS [a Hunde militia] was called here by the government, so that all of them could be integrated into the army," he said. They weren't the only ones: "Even the Nyatura were everywhere around Kitchanga...They were supposed to support the FARDC in their fight against M23."

A powder keg had been lit. "When the government integrated the CNDP, the commanders refused to go elsewhere. They asked to stay here and control this area. When the FARDC asked the APCLS and the Nyatura to come to town for integration, the ex-CNDP commanders were in contact with M23," he said. Who knows if this is true -- the important thing is that the APCLS, and some percentage of the local Hunde and Hutu community, thought it was true.

The shooting began when an APCLS fighter was killed in the "Rutshuru" side of town. A posse of his comrades attempted to recover his body, which invited a predictable response. "That's when the fighting started," the man said. That tiny fire, kindled over months of escalating tension, was enough to ignite a violence that destroyed the entire city enter -- that resulted in the hospital getting shelled, apparently by the FARDC, and in IDP camps being attacked, apparently by the APCLS.

According to one Goma-based observer who visited Kitchanga a couple of weeks before it exploded, the disaster unfolded with little intervention from the UN and the government. "The Kitchanga area has 100,000 people. Everyone was aware of the problem. Not a single emissary was sent. The UN and the government did nothing. There was no effort made to get people to the table and have them talk." (Dwyer says that "MONUSCO was involved in efforts to try to diffuse this situation," but did not go into additional detail.) The tensions hadn't abated: the terrified district administrator said that some people suspected a nearby IDP settlement was actually a military encampment for M23 sympathizers.

Kitchanga's IDP camp is crisscrossed with streams. The city's most vulnerable residents live atop a rocky swamp, where water rushes and pools and crawls, invading the alleys between tents and accumulating in every unoccupied wedge of space. "Everyone is afraid to talk," James said. "There isn't really peace." The sky glowered, full with the rain we both dreaded.

We found a tent where two withering women, who might have been 20 or 40 or 60 years old, sat and killed time. They had first arrived in Kitchanga six years ago, when they were fleeing the CNDP. "In March, when the fighting broke out here, we had to run away again," one of them told me. Much of the town had joined them in taking refuge in the forest. "When we came back, nothing was left. Everything was stolen. Even the brush on the roof of our hut was stolen."

The storm began as a hum, as the suggestion of rain, droplets whispering on a tarp roof. And then it became loud enough to silence our conversation and any worries I had about the conditions of the road -- to overwhelm even the most natural thoughts and fears. Our voices faded into the static roar of the deluge, imposing total silence upon us. The onslaught showed no signs of passing, and the roof did not leak, even as heavy raindrops shattered overhead.

Then tiny, clear marbles began skipping trough gaps in the bottom of the tarp, ice like mancala beads, smooth frozen disks dumped from the raging sky. It seemed impossible in a hot equatorial country, a place with palm trees and tropical birds, as if an ice storm in Kitchanga was some deliberate final rebuke to the idea that anything here, or anywhere else, needed to make much sense. Ice skipped across the ground like firm glass pills. Even at a touch they would barely sweat. This was strong and resilient ice -- brilliant, opalescent, dangerous to our purposes. "We have to go," James said. Before we ran into the storm, I asked one of the women if it rained like this very often. Every day, she replied.

The center of town sat deserted. By emptying the city, the ice and rain had revealed the extent of the devastation. The blackened trees and lumps of concrete went further back from the road than I'd realized; the men selling shoes and dress shirts, now sheltering under flimsy tin ledges, had hidden the empty frames, the piles of rubble and ash, flat reservations patterned with the footprints of destroyed buildings.

Weather, like war, is a situation from which no one is wholly immune. And this rain seemed possessed with a conscious rage: the sky heaved with force and violence, pounding Hutu and Hunde and Tutsi, pounding FARDC and APCLS and M23, slamming into refugee tents and army bases, into bicycle pushers and NGO trucks, pounding the rocky earth, pounding the empty gray spaces where a city once stood.

This reporting was sponsored in part by Oxfam America.

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