Reports of Starvation in Congo

KABINDA, Congo (AP) -- Parents reaching a front-line hospital this weekend with stick-thin children in their arms told of countless civilians succumbing to disease and hunger in burned, looted villages cut off throughout Congo's 2½-year-old war.

The hospital at Kabinda -- where 185 emaciated children lay on and under the 60 available beds, with a 2-week-old measles epidemic raging -- provided a first look at a hidden death toll that one international aid group has estimated in the millions.

''I came because I wanted to save them,'' said Ntambue Ntambue, who arrived at Kabinda with two starving, sick children, after seeing two of his others die untreated during a year of hiding in the bush. ''Now I must go back and get the rest.''

''We knew if we didn't come, we would lose everyone,'' said Ntambue Kilolo, who walked two days through rebel-controlled territory to reach Kabinda with his 5-year-old daughter, leaving his five other children behind.

The girl -- weighing 17 pounds -- slumped Saturday with a feeding tube in her nose, eyes rolling in her sockets and the frail bones of her skull sharp.

The Associated Press was the first news organization that Congo's government has permitted to cross to the front line at Kabinda, a southeastern hilltop city of 140,000. The AP spoke to parents and workers at the hospital Saturday.

Kabinda was under siege for two years during the war, surrounded by Rwanda-backed rebel forces who hoped to seize the city and its airstrip and push on to nearby diamond fields.

Now a cease-fire has started to gell, and rebel fighters have begun withdrawing from land around the government-controlled town. The 300 adults and children at the hospital are the first to trickle in from the surrounding countryside.

Outsiders are finally getting some direct clues to a humanitarian disaster whose scope has only been guessed at until now.

Congo's war started in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda, acting with Congolese rebels, invaded to try to oust Congo's president at the time, Laurent Kabila. Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia entered the war on the government's side, stopping the offensive after it had seized 60 percent of the Western Europe-sized nation.

Peace efforts moved forward after the Jan. 16 assassination of Kabila and the succession of his son, Joseph. A U.N.-monitored accord obligated all sides to start pulling back forces from battle zones -- like Kabinda -- as of mid-March.

Congo remains divided into government- and rebel-allied sides, and international organizations have been unable to reach much of the interior to deliver aid -- or even assess the need for it.

The U.S.-based International Rescue Committee has estimated the war's death toll on the rebel-held side alone at 1.7 million, mostly among civilians believed to have died of hunger and malnutrition. The organization is expected soon to formally revise its estimate to 3 million dead.

''This confirms that report,'' Tshimanga Yatshimba, a government official at Kabinda, said as he walked through the hospital's courtyard, sweeping a hand at the children lining the concrete walkway.

Many had the blond hair of longtime malnutrition. Edema, caused by a diet without protein, puffed the limbs of some children. Most were scabbed with lesions.

There must be ''so many more sick out there who don't have the means to come,'' Yatshimba said.

Kabinda remains encircled today, with armored-personnel carriers and Zimbabwean and Congolese troops lining the one government-held road, west out of rebel territory. The surrounding area remains under rebel administration.

Adults among the patients said rebel fighters stole their crops and cattle, often burning their homes. Many said they hid in the bush, feeding their families on scavenged cassava leaves.

''The old ones die in the villages. They don't come here,'' said Sister Maria Marta Kuhnapfd, a nurse at the hospital.

The hospital has 150 beds, including 60 in the pediatrics ward. It has enough medicine to treat the patients who have already arrived for another six to eight weeks -- but word is that many more are on their way, said Dr. Claire Nogier.

Kabinda's airport is closed to day-to-day traffic with the war, and the next government town is a bumpy 8-hour drive away for even the best four-wheel-drive vehicle -- or a week for most trucks.

One of the hospital's doctors made the trip this week, heading to Kinshasa to ask urgently for tents, other supplies and more medicine to handle the influx.

''When we walk through here, they say, 'We are still hungry,''' Nogier said of the patients. Food shortages mean the starving who reach the hospital get only two dishes of porridge a day, plus one meal of manioc and corn.

Most of the sick arrive by foot. With the territory opening up again, the hospital this week saw its first maternity case in two years. It was a 21-year-old woman, who bled all the way on her 12-hour trip on the back of a bicycle. She was eight months pregnant. By the time she got here, the child was dead in her womb.

Another heavily pregnant woman, Ngoyi Nalamgu, wept as her emaciated 1-year-old boy turned away again and again from the feeding spoon he was being offered. After too long without food, young children can forget how to eat.

''I'm afraid my child will die,'' Nalamgu said. Doctors inserted a feeding tube.

With no vaccinations in rebel-held territory around the city since the war began, measles have broken out -- logging at least a 10-percent death rate among the often badly malnourished children at the hospital, the health workers said.

Kilolo said the measles outbreak alone has killed hundreds in and around his town of 2,000. Other parents spoke of entire families of six or more children dying.

Other diseases are rife, and worse because they were left untreated during the war. One third of the patients arrive with tuberculosis, and one-third with treatment-resistant malaria.