Jon Rosen in Roads & Kingdoms:
More here“Sécurité iko bien.” It was the baritone voice of Edgar Kamaliro, driver of our mud- strewn Mitsubishi Pajero, informing us—in a hybrid of French and Swahili—that all was safe on the road ahead.
Image by Jon Rosen
We were somewhere on a dark and lonely road in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the news was reassuring. Though our route was supposed to be safe, we were still in one of the world’s most lawless countries, and the no-nonsense, linebacker-sized driver had spent much of the afternoon on his cell phone, calling friends in towns ahead of us to make sure no rebels were in the area. A veteran of these roads, he was used to such precautions. A decade earlier, this region, known as Ituri, was home to some of the heaviest fighting and worst human rights abuses of the long simmering Congo crisis, a web of inter-related conflicts that began in 1996 when neighboring Rwanda invaded to pursue militias responsible for its1994 genocide. Since then, aid groups estimate that more than 5 million people have died as a result of conflict in Congo’s east, mainly due to non-violent causes such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, and malnutrition.
