Greetings from Bunia

Don't look for us on a map -- Bunia is a speck of a town in the hills of eastern Congo, not far from the border with Sudan. It's also the base for UN operations in the Ituri region, which was hit hardest by Congo's civil war of the past few years. We arrived in Friday morning to see that things were pretty stable in Bunia -- lots of cars and motorbikes speeding down the dusty road (that's singular), lots of young guys selling cellular airtime and petrol out of jerrycans, and lots of white SUVs with "UN" painted on the sides in black.

The war here was incredibly complex, involving a hodgepodge of dueling tribes, warlords and militias, often backed by Congo's greedy neighbors, like Uganda and Rwanda, who were trying to get their hands on Congo's diamonds, gold and other natural treasures. The UN and the Congolese "army" (it's really just a patchwork force of ex-combatants who are less likely to protect you than rob you) are trying to root out the last of the militiamen hiding in the northeast, before national elections next month.

The UN has managed to build a pretty nice compound here, with decent food, cold beer, tennis courts and a big TV screen in an outdoor courtyard, so over dinner with our newfound Bangladeshi peacekeeper friends the last couple of nights, we've watched Michael Jackson videos and, last night, "War of the Worlds" with Tom Cruise. We actually walked out of that movie halfway through because it was getting cold. And, as Grewal, a Punjabi military observer, put it, when you've been working in eastern Congo for a few months, a movie about extraterrestrial machines taking over the world doesn't really scare you that much.