Kagame, Paul

Artillery boomed, shaking the ground, as a couple scurried through the streets of Saké, their possessions balanced on their heads, in the embattled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.At a crossroads, they passed a giant poster of Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, who is standing for re-election on Dec. 20. “Unity, Security, Prosperity,” read the slogan. They hurried along.“Our children were born in war. We live in war,” Jean Bahati, his face beaded with sweat, said as he paused for breath. It was the fifth time that he and his wife had been forced to flee, he said. “We’re so sick of it.”They joined 6.5 million people displaced by war in eastern Congo, where a conflict that has dragged on for nearly three decades, stoking a vast humanitarian crisis that by some estimates has claiming over six million lives, is now lurching into a volatile new phase.Making sense of the mayhem is not easy. Over 100 armed groups and several national armies are vying for supremacy across a region of lakes, mountains and rainforests slightly bigger than Florida. Meddlesome foreign powers covet its vast reserves of gold, oil and coltan, a mineral used to make cellphones and electric vehicles. Corruption is endemic. Massacres and rape are common.For all that, aid groups struggle to draw attention to the suffering in a country of about 100 million people, even when the numbers affected dwarf those of other crises.“There’s a sense of fatalism about Congo,” said Cynthia Jones, the World Food Program head in eastern Congo. “People seem to think ‘that’s just the way it is’.”However this latest phase of the war, which began in earnest two years ago, is drawn in unusually clear lines.On one side is the M23, a well-organized but ruthless rebel group that the United States and the United Nations say is backed by Rwanda, Congo’s eastern neighbor, which is one-hundredth the size of Congo. (Rwanda denies any link.) Since October, the M23 has seized the main roads into Goma, the regional capital, as well as the hilltops overlooking Saké, 10 miles to the west.People fleeing fighting this month pass an election poster for Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, in Saké. Parts of eastern Congo are so unstable that voting has been canceled there.An aerial view of the regional capital of Goma. Since October, the militia group known as M23 has seized the main roads into Goma.On the other side is Congo’s army, whose troops are notoriously ill-disciplined — even as fighting raged near Saké last week, drunken soldiers careened through its streets. But their strength is boosted by two new allies.One is the Wazalendo, Swahili for patriots, a coalition of once-rival militias that the government cobbled together to repel M23, despite the fighters’ reputation for factionalism and brutality.The second is a force of about 1,000 Romanian mercenaries, many formerly with the French Foreign Legion, deployed around Goma and Saké. If M23 tries to seize the city — as it briefly did once, in 2012 — the Romanians are charged with defending it. “They are the last line of defense,” Romuald, a retired French officer advising the Congolese military, said at a lakeside restaurant in Goma. He asked to omit his surname to protect his security.Amid all that, an election is taking place. More