Word: goma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Madness spreads like an eager germ through the camps that have doubled, then doubled again in size. Between the town of Goma and the airport, a woman dances naked down the highway, cursing at the listless crowds and at the corpses lying on mats by the roadside. A man at the edge of a mass grave laughs in delight when he manages to toss the lifeless body of a child squarely into the middle of the burial pit. A team of laborers is moving bodies from a field to the trucks nearby, when a young man lying among the corpses...
...This is the beginning of the final days," declares Deogracias Bivunde, who watched at least 40 refugees be trampled in a stampede by his home outside Goma. "This is the apocalypse." Two weeks ago Goma was a quiet place on the shores of a lovely lake, tucked amid banana groves and thick woodlands in the shadow of a spectacular volcano that lit the northern sky at night. The town was home to 80,000 residents; now it has more than a million sick and starving newcomers. Outside the airport, a sign extols The Pleasure of Traveling...
...Munigi camp is about six miles up the road from Goma. Two relief workers lift a girl in a pretty turquoise dress and feel her neck for a pulse. Finding none, they carry her over to the pile of corpses, which they will douse in chlorine to disinfect them. But as they put her down, her head turns. Quickly they take her back to the tent where they are treating victims, but do not bother to set up an IV. She is too sick to save, the workers explained. "But she's moving," says one, "so you can't just...
...hunger and the sickness conspire to kill as many as possible, but the hate still works as well. Hutu continue to attack Tutsi in the Goma camps. These bodies are different -- not passive, wasting corpses, but twisted wrecks of crushed skulls and flaking blood. A Tutsi woman is accused of brewing poison tea and giving it to 60 Rwandan soldiers, killing them all. She is beaten to death. One group of Hutu fall upon a Tutsi man along the road to the airport, beat him senseless, then lay him on his stomach and stomp on his spine until it snaps...
Everywhere are the children, alone and terrified. At a camp west of Goma, Adrien Ntahobari, 12, sits with his niece Florinne, 6. They sob together. "I lost my mother. I don't know where she is," says the boy. The day before, the children had wandered for hours through the vast crowds looking for her in vain. They returned at nightfall to sleep in the open, curled up together in - Adrien's oversize sweater. "I am hungry and my head is hurting," he says, wiping flies from his swollen eyes. Neither child has eaten in two days, and Adrien...