Late last month, Britain's ITN showed a documentary which seemed out of the ordinary given that the world's eyes were again glued to the televised war in Iraq.

Location: Bunia, the Congo. That's in west Africa.

"But who'd know or even remember the 'forgotten continent'?" my old professor Cherry Gertzel reminded me as we talked over dinner 10 days into April.

The old bat was still firing all cylinders in her belly - a passionate African specialist from my old university.

"To study Africa you must be prepared to have your guts wrenched. Not too many people in this world want to go through that," she said.

"Far easier to make money than to save African lives. The Middle East means money. Africa means a slow and agonising death. And nobody (cares)."

She had a point. Again. A really good point.

Bloodied soil

Take Ruhigwa Likoka, a Congolese of the Hema tribe. The British documentary shows Likoka shoving earth o­n to the hacked bodies of his four small children. There are no TV cameras here, no journalists 'embedded' in this place, its soil still soaking with the blood of its people.

It's March 2003. The pale green hillside is empty, deserted. Villagers have fled the tribal killings that have been raging through places like Ituri in the Congo's northeast. The same gory carnage is slowly spreading throughout the former Belgian colony, freed in 1960.

Likoka hears a birdsong from o­ne of the surrounding parched trees. Congo's 40-year civil war was supposed to have ended in March.

Likoka doesn't know it, and even if he did it makes no difference to him now. His children have been murdered.

In the renewed inter-ethnic bloodshed in early April the United Nations says some 1,000 people were killed, just as US forces had driven into the centre of Baghdad and draped an American flag over the face of a larger-than-life statue of the murderous tyrant Saddam Hussein.

Unlike the US- led forces in Iraq, the UN, which has 4,500 peacekeepers in Congo, is barely visible, much less able to stop the war. Nevertheless it is quick to blame the deaths o­n militias armed with guns and machetes.

Twenty mass graves have been found - so far. Scores of victims lie near death in hospitals. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Most of the dead are from the Hema tribe, slaughtered by the Lendu, who are backed by the Ugandan soldiers in the country. Uganda denies its soldiers are involved in the killings. The Hema don't believe the invaders.

Peace deal

Yet representatives of Congo's warring factions were recently praised "for taking a step closer to peace". They signed a deal in South Africa to form the country's first power-sharing government in 40 years.

The agreement commits them to hold the country's first democratic elections since independence. President Joseph Kabila, who took over from his dead father Laurent Kabila (photo), will lead the two-year transitional government.

It was to have been formed last month but postponed to this month and, in all probability, will be postponed again indefinitely.

Kabila Jr (right) was to have been assisted by four vice-presidents, chosen from the government, the two main warring groups, and the political Opposition.

And Congo's Information Minister Kikaya Karubi blurted: "Today is a day of unity. Today is a day when we put an end to a war that has been tearing our country apart. Today is a day of reconciliation."

To people like Likoka these are mere words, the politician's hype. The same kind made by Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri upon signing the cease fire agreement with separatists in Aceh, but which now threatens to renew the bloodshed.

The Hema tribes have heard such promises a million other times. They say such agreements are written in the blood of innocent men, women and children murdered and buried in mass graves.

Their misgivings grow when they learn Joseph Kabila didn't even turn up for the signing
ceremony, raising renewed speculation he is least committed to waging peace.

African studies experts in London are also wary of the agreement when it was first mooted. Now they're dismissing it outright, saying it is sure to collapse because fighting has broken out again in Congo's northern and eastern regions.

Economic plunder

There's nothing anyone can do to stop the carnage - as in 1998 when rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda overthrew the Laurent Kabila government.

Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe had then sent in troops to support the fallen administration. But that o­nly led to the conflict widening, and more intensively when the troops withdrew, leaving the Rwandan and Ugandan invaders to control much of the Congo.

Analysts estimate more than two million people have been killed so far. The International Red Cross puts the figure at over three million - from the slaughter, and from disease and starvation. Still, the killings will continue.

When most western foreign troops withdrew last year under a 1999 cease fire agreement, new rounds of bloodletting quickly erupted between the Lendu and the Hema tribes.
Congo's story is as horrible as Iraq's under Saddam, and just as complex. Like Iraq, Congo has never been a stable country.

It is as vast as Iraq, and equally fragmented. There's not o­ne party that hasn't fixed its eyes o­n Congo's mineral wealth, which has been looted systematically or haphazardly.

And behind the militia's slaughter are ancient tribal rivalries and the economic plunder of the Congo by the tribes' foreign backers. Rwanda and Uganda, o­nce allies, soon fell out and have been fighting each other o­n Congolese soil.

Amid the latest bloodletting, London-based analysts say Uganda and Rwanda are getting ready to intervene again in the Congo civil war - ironically o­ne that both have intensified.

The International Crisis Group says some 5,000 Rwandan troops had never left the Congo but were seconded to its main rebel proxy, the Rally for Congolese Democracy.

Reinforced by more Rwandan regulars, the rebels are now moving north to Ituri. Meanwhile Ugandan troops have marched back across the Congolese border, and together with the Hema militias, have begun shelling Bunia with mortars.

To Bunians the Ugandans are 'liberators'. But to analysts the unfinished business between Rwanda and Uganda looks set to turn even bloodier.

Protracted conflict

That's not all. As in Afghanistan - and it could well happen in Iraq o­nce the dust settles - the war in Ituri is sure to worsen as two old tribal squabbles square off again, this time armed less with machetes and more with guns from Rwanda and Uganda. Both tribes wish for the extinction of the other.

And with Rwandan and Ugandan forces bound to face off each other in the Congo, and the cattle-herding Hemas are hoping to exact revenge o­n the seed-growing Lendus.

Analysts say the renewal of war will plunge the Congo into a protracted conflict which no Western power is willing to intervene, including the increasingly irrelevant UN.

Even if they did, there'll be no easy or lasting solutions. Traditional and modern patron-client relations fostered inside the Congo, and by the growing Uganda-Rwanda rivalry, continue to build a web of complexities between the rival tribal militias and their foreign backers.

Ten years ago Uganda chose the Hema tribes as its business partner in the mineral-rich Ituri province.

When the war began Uganda armed several Hema militia groups.

Thinking this to be a bold strategic move, Uganda created the Union of Patriotic Congolese (UPC), which is Hema-based, o­nly to find the UPC suddenly switch its allegiance to Rwanda.

In a rearguard action Uganda then formed an alliance with sections of the Lendu militias who had become resentful of the main Lendu leadership.

Uganda allowed the leopard-skin-swathed warriors to join the Ugandan regulars, with both conducting successful rampages through Bunia province early last March. Now, though, Rwanda and the Lendus are striking back to regain lost territory.

It is hard to know if Ugandan forces in the Congo will stay or leave, but Rwanda has already vetoed its Lendu rebels from joining any future government.

And more than Uganda, Rwandan regulars will probably stay in the Congo to fight o­n another battle front - to destroy remnants of the Rwandan army that had conducted the genocidal war in Rwanda in 1994.

No returns

In Iraq Saddam had used oil money and western-imposed economic sanctions to finance his brutal military and police. In the Congo Rwanda's military excursion is being financed by the systematic plunder of Congolese resource wealth.

But the huge Kilomoto goldmine in Ituri has shut down. That could make Rwanda's (and Ugandan) plunder more difficult, and possibly make for a short-lived war.

Meanwhile, desperate Congolese peasants have begun digging up a local airstrip to pan the dirt of ore. There's no food without money, and no time to grow any food crops when you're o­n the run to save your life.

"But who'd remember the Congo, or Africa for that matter?" Gertzel presses me as I try to shove a piece of pita bread into my mouth.

"Who'd care if the black-purple skinned people kill each other off? They have no oil, not like Nigeria. Not like Iraq. Right?" Gertzel continued, her eyes bright with anger and frustration.

I stopped eating. Suddenly I wasn't hungry anymore. Gerty got me again - like she did 15 years ago.

CNN was quick to announce the coming of democracy and capitalism to Iraq - thanks to America. God bless America.

CNN isn't embedded in the Congo, or anywhere else in the 'forgotten continent.' Rich countries aren't willing to let their soldiers die in the Congo for nothing in return.

MANJIT BHATIA is managing director of AsiaRisk - a political and economic research and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. The writer specialises in international economics and politics and the Asia Pacific region.