WITNESS - Counting bodies on Congo's front line

Finbarr O'Reilly, Reuters chief photographer for West and Central Africa, was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1971 and started as an arts correspondent. He joined Reuters in 2001, turning to photography in 2005 and winning the World Press Photo Award for picture of the year in 2006. In the following story he describes his latest reporting mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

By Finbarr O'Reilly

KIBATI, Congo (Reuters) - A Congolese refugee in a tattered baseball cap, worn clothes and blue flip-flops begged me for a cigarette at Kibati, a camp for 65,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Congo.

I scolded him, saying smoking was bad for his health, as if anything could be worse for your health than living in this conflict-racked corner of Democratic Republic of Congo.

Machine gun fire erupted nearby and people dived for cover, ducking into rows of flimsy tents made from torn sheets of white plastic stretched over sticks.

"Mister, mister, come lie down in here," a voice called from one tent as bullets hummed nearby like an electrical current.

I snapped a few blurry pictures of people running before crawling through the curtain door of the tent, where a man and two children huddled on the ground. I kneeled above them and took a few more photographs.

"When you hear gunshots, if you lie flat, you can be OK, but if you stay up like that, paff!" said the man, Boniface Buhoro, a tailor who had fled weeks of combat further north in an area now controlled by anti-government Tutsi rebels.

Several people had already been killed by gunfire in this refugee camp in North Kivu province at the foot of Nyiragongo volcano on the front lines between Congo's army and advancing rebels. At least two more were killed in the next few days.