KIBATI, Congo -- The teenage newlyweds fled the fighting in eastern Congo that destroyed their home. They want to start a family, but their lives remain on hold months later along with 20,000 others at this refugee camp.
Here children play with trash in the dirt beside open sewers, while their parents wait in long lines for food provided by aid groups.
"It's still not safe for us to go back home yet," said Christophe Matata, 19, as his 18-year-old wife Odette lit a cook fire by their plastic tarp strung over discarded bits of wood. "Life back at home was really scary, with blasts of gunshots roaming the air."
There were renewed hopes for peace in the region after Rwandan troops arrested Congo's powerful Tutsi rebel leader in January and an unprecedented joint Congolese-Rwandan military operation drove out some of the extremist Hutu militia fighters linked to Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
But fears of resumed violence are widespread among refugees, many of whom already had lived through Congo's back-to-back civil wars even before the rebel advance by Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda's troops drove 250,000 people from their homes last year.
"We're not really sure that everything is OK," Christophe Matata said. "That's why we want to stay where we are."
Eastern Congo has been mired in conflict since Rwanda's genocide nearly 15 years ago spilled war across the border and Hutu militias sought refuge here. Nkunda contends he was defending the region's minority Tutsis against the Rwandan Hutus.
In a rare move by former enemies, Congolese and Rwandan forces drove out about 600 of the Hutu militia's fighters earlier this year and the Congolese army hoped to force out 400 more by the end of March, said Kudura Kasongo, the Congolese presidential spokesman.
But that potentially leaves as many as 5,000 to 6,000 fighters still in eastern Congo, according to figures provided by Kasongo and the U.N.
"The concern is what happens next, now that the Rwandans have left," said Ross Mountain, the U.N.'s deputy mission chief in Congo.
U.N. officials say in recent weeks the Hutu militiamen have already started fighting to retake their old positions and are carrying out reprisal attacks on civilians who they suspect cooperated with the Congolese-Rwandan offensive - forcing at least 35,000 people to flee their homes in recent weeks.
Last week, Alan Doss, the U.N. special envoy to Congo, visited two hotspots now held by U.N. peacekeepers and vowed that the hunt will continue "to stop them from regaining their positions, and committing further exactions on the local population."
Stung by accusations that the U.N. peacekeepers were failing their mandate to protect civilians and use force when necessary, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ordered them to hold their ground at dozens of remote locations.
"We revised these rules of engagement, so we will be more proactively protecting the civilian population," Ban told The Associated Press.
The U.N. peacekeepers are supposed to join with the Congolese army in hunting militiamen who have fled to the forests.
"Are they going to be able to tackle the threat? It is difficult to give you a positive answer," said Senegalese Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye, the U.N. mission's force commander. "If this deployment is properly done, I think that they will have some capacities - not to prevent all atrocities, but at least to be capable of a degree of, let's say, diminishing them."
Behind the public encouragement for an end to the conflicts, government and U.N. officials were less confident in their private assessments that the fighters had been neutralized.
Officials also worry about the 20 other militias that operate in the region. Without more troops and equipment to cover an area the size of Western Europe, they say, the new orders may not help much.
"There is no way in the world, whatever the mandate says, that we're going to be behind every banana tree," Mountain said. "This is just simply impossible for us to be able to prevent all these (reprisals)."
And so thousands of refugees say they are enduring misery in the refugee camps rather than risk renewed violence in their communities.
Sebukoko Sebazungu, 49, who has eight children, says life in Kibati is desperate. There's no way to educate any of the children at the camp, but he sees little alternative: "From where we come from, there's not one house that's still standing," he says.
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