After five years of war and more than three million deaths, an uncertain peace is taking hold in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Paul Cullen travelled with refugees returning home from the Republic of Congo
From the air, the forest is a vast carpet of green, stretching as far as the eye can see. Giant rivers, easily a few miles wide at their thickest, snake through the landscape. Signs of human settlement are non-existent.
This is the rural part of the Republic of Congo, novelist Joseph Conrad's "heart of darkness", a terrain almost as difficult to negotiate today as it was for the 19th-century explorers who opened up the interior for European exploitation.
In a region bereft of paved roads, train services and ferries, all journeys have an epic quality. If the searing heat doesn't stop you in your tracks, torrential downpours will turn your dirt-track into a mudbath or disease-carrying insects will sap your health and strength.
At a quayside at Betou, in the far northern corner of the country, are two small boats and 109 people about to make as momentous a voyage as any undertaken by booty-hunting explorers.
These people are going home. After five years living in refugee camps here, they have decided it is safe to return to their villages on the far side of the river. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which is organising their repatriation, hopes that many thousands more will follow their example.
Their journey will take them hundreds of miles up swollen rivers, along muddy paths made impassable during the rainy season and over fallen trees to reach home, a mere clearing in the forest.
"We knew when we left that we would be away for a long time. Now I feel it is time, and our return will go well," Octavie Iwanga, surrounded by her husband and seven children aged between three months and 10 years, tells me. "We will be farmers when we go back, and my husband, he will fish."
Victor Benga-Tongovi, a teacher who serves on the refugees' committee, is also optimistic: "There are people at home who are profiting in our absence and have taken over our fields, but we have confidence that we will be able to farm again."
This is a tale of two Congos, both wretchedly poor. On the far side of the Oubangui river are Victor and Octavie's homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony the size of western Europe, in which "Africa's world war" was fought until two years ago, and where three million people died from conflict, hunger and malnutrition.
On this side of the swollen, muddy river is the Republic of Congo, once ruled by the French; while it too has suffered conflict in recent times, it has provided safe refuge for up to 60,000 people fleeing the war in the Democratic Republic.
THEIR REPATRIATION IS seen as a test for a further 300,000 refugees who fled the east of the Democratic Republic (which is still racked by violence) to neighbouring countries. Another 2.3 million people are internally displaced within the Democratic Republic of Congo, and maybe they too will eventually move back. If all can be successfully brought home and elections go ahead as planned next year, then perhaps - a big perhaps - the job of raising the country out of extreme poverty can get properly underway.
The operation, beset by logistical problems, is much delayed. "Strangely, repatriation has proved easier in the wet season than in the dry season. While it's harder then to travel by road, the river flows deeper," explains Modeste Kouame, head of the UNHCR's field operation in Betou. "Plus, the refugees are used to the boats; it's travelling in the trucks on rough roads that makes them throw up."
In all, 16,000 refugees are sheltered around Betou, in 39 sites along a 160km (100-mile) stretch of the river. The refugees we are travelling with were collected by boat from various villages the day before and brought to a reception camp.
They have few possessions - sleeping mats, a few pots and pans, a simple chair. "The smaller the site they come from, the less they have. They take everything, but everything is nothing by Western standards," Modeste says.
The women wear long, bright, patterned dresses; the men and children wear Western hand-me-downs. Used to a lifetime of waiting, they sit quietly, watching the aid workers with their laptops and their clipboards go through the formalities.
Before boarding, they have been screened for malaria and other diseases, and sick refugees have been removed from the list and brought to hospital. Immigration procedures have been attended to, school certificates provided, and training given in landmine awareness.
Officially, there's no Aids here, although practical estimates suggest up to 20 per cent are affected. "Why would we test for Aids when we have nothing to treat it with?" asks a Belgian aid worker, drily.
The refugees speak dutifully of their love for their homeland, perhaps telling me what they think I want to hear rather than the unvarnished truth. "My country is my country. I feel better there," says Jean-Max Bobiya, whose parents were killed in the war. "I do not feel foreign here, but it is not my home."
YET GOING HOME means an end to regular rations and the relative comfort of the refugee camp. While refugees in the West are marginalised, those in Africa often enjoy better conditions than the surrounding populations.
For five years, UNHCR and the aid agencies it funds in Betou have been providing health and education services, as well as dispensing advice on farming and microfinance; now, with the departure of the refugees, most of this is coming to an end. The returnees will be given cooking utensils, blankets, and a supply of rations - but the food will run out after three months.
Their departure, and that of the humanitarian organisations, is bad news too for Betou. Already, its fine new hospital lies virtually empty after the French agency that built it decided to move on.
Originally, it had 55 staff; now there is just one doctor and a few nurses. A further six doctors were appointed but they refused to come, probably because they doubted the government would ever pay their salaries.
To pay for the new facilities, charges were introduced. Paying the local equivalent of 60 cent to see the doctor might seem cheap to us but it's a fortune to many locals, "so you have people putting off going to the doctor, and not bringing their children when they're sick. The result is more malaria, and more deaths," one frustrated aid worker tells me.
At the bank of the river, the refugees are checked one last time. To prevent double-claiming, each person is photographed and their family members and details carefully noted.
Computers and digital photography seem incongruous in the midst of tremendous poverty, but even more expensive technology is on the way, with biometric and DNA testing promised as part of the battle against fraud.
It's a three-hour journey upriver to the transit centre at Monzombo, on the Democratic Republic side. If there is still wildlife on this stretch of the Oubangui, it's well hidden; no crocodiles, no hippopotamuses, not even any birds are to be seen. "The only monkeys I've seen around here are smoked ones, in the market," quips one aid worker.
The rainforest, too, has retreated in the face of human depredation and timber companies have to travel far into the interior to pillage valuable teak and mahogany.
THE SIGHT OF home territory brings on a bout of ululation and spontaneous song from the boats. The refugees step on to land with polite declarations of satisfaction but no other external shows of emotion.
Octavie says she is happy to be home, then quietly joins the queue for registration. Life has not got easier or better - it has simply changed banks.
By nightfall, all the refugees have been through a debriefing, which includes a request by aid workers that they not follow the example of one woman who used her mosquito net as a bridal veil.
The journey to their home villages continues by jeep and, when the forest or the rivers eventually bar the way, by foot. Under the trees, by the equator, they will rebuild their lives, reclaim their remaining possessions and hope the conflict does not erupt again.
Further upstream at Libenge, a group of women who returned home earlier this year are being trained in handicrafts. Jeanette Malemi, a mother of three, is ambivalent about this new life, telling me her temporary new house is "okay for the time being".
"It is a big joy to be back, and with all you people visiting, I am sure there are good things to come," she remarks coyly, without looking up from the turquoise, red and white carpet she is weaving. Apart from a permanent house, Jeanette wishes for a sewing machine and some money to buy fabric, so she can make clothes.
The security situation in this part of the country is quiet, and UN peacekeeping forces have withdrawn to other, more troubled parts. Even so, refugees appear to be taking a "wait and see" approach, and UNHCR has had to revise downwards the number it expects to return this year, from 25,000 to 10,000.
Peace is fragile in these parts. The army had looted another town downstream of here and a militia allied to Rwandan Hutus burned 40 people - mainly women and children - to death in their homes in a village in the east of the country just before we left Betou for the Democratic Republic.
"You couldn't blame them for not rushing over," admits one Swedish aid worker. "If I was on the other side, I'd wait to see how things settled down."