IRC estimates 40 percent of Congo's wartime deaths could have been avoided by access to the kind of basic health care that was becoming scarce even before the rebellions that started in 1996. At the start of the current war, only two of 11 provincial health inspectors had working vehicles. But his mother died of relentless diarrhea. Further aggravating the situation is Congo's economy, the world's fastest-shrinking since the war began. Even as a cease-fire has held on the front lines, massacres have continued behind rebel lines where militias and rebel armies attack villages on the suspicion inhabitants are helping the other side.
Some groups are simply homicidal.
The men who kicked in the door of Jean Pierre Mushobozi's hut in the village of Buguli one night in November were Hutu extremists from Rwanda now fighting for the Congolese government. Congo's vast jungles are populated by untold thousands who no longer feel safe in their homes but are ill equipped for living in the bush. You don't see the bodies.'' World Food Program workers in South Kivu are returning from newly accessible villages with reports of more malnourished adults than children.