Marc Moreau, owner of Orchid's Villa, a small hotel on the shore of Lake Kivu in Bukavu, stopped waiting for tourists to arrive long ago. His hotel may be booked solid these days, but the guests aren't the kind Moreau would like to see, even if they do bring in money.

An aid worker sits at a corner table eating steak tartare. On the veranda, a United Nations official is drinking Primus Beer, drowning his sorrows over the deaths of eight Guatemalan peacekeepers. The glassy-eyed Belgian sitting next to him is in charge of troop logistics. He's drinking gin-and-tonics and thinking about his wife, who lives in Croatia.

If they were tourists, Moreau's guests would be gazing out at Lake Kivu, framed by soft, green hills, an area Polish author and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski once called "one of Africa's most beautiful regions, a fairytale world of forests and lakes." Instead, the men at Orchid's Villa are listening intently to reports coming out of a shortwave radio set up at the hotel. Radio France is reporting that 80,000 people in North Kivu Province have fled into the forests, while fighting in the country's southeastern Katanga Province has already made more than 100,000 Congolese homeless.

"We live from one day to the next here," says Moreau. He knows what he's talking about. Ever since Moreau, the son of a Belgian colonial official, was born in Bukavu 72 years ago, he has seen wars, coups and unrest come and go. "Something is brewing again right now," he says, lowering the shades. Bukavu turns into a treacherous ghost town at night, a patchwork of corrugated metal neighborhoods ruled by looters and the rattling of Kalashnikovs. The night here belongs to the marauders.

A vast war has been raging in the eastern section of Congo for 10 years now, but little has been done about the violence. Although the UN's Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) already has about 17,000 troops stationed at various bases throughout the region, the peacekeepers have a reputation for making themselves scarce when the situation becomes too precarious.

Last Wednesday the government announced plans to hold elections on June 18. The elections will come just in time. Under the treaties that put an end to open civil war in 2002, the term of the current multiparty government in Kinshasa is set to expire on June 30. The country has already crossed an important hurdle on the road to peace. On Saturday, February 18, President Joseph Kabila signed the new constitution approved by the Congolese people in a popular referendum last December.

But amid concerns that the scheduled elections are unlikely to proceed as smoothly, the UN has asked European Union countries to help provide security.

No one doubts that holding elections is a risky business in this central African country, which hasn't seen free elections in 46 years. Part of the concern over potential violence stems from the fact that some members of the current government, Vice Presidents Azarias Ruberwa and Jean-Pierre Bemba, for example, are former militia leaders who stand little chance of winning a free election but happen to control large numbers of armed men.

Germany mulls deployment

German Chancellor Angela Merkel hasn't ruled out sending Germany's military, the Bundeswehr, to help provide security in Africa's killing fields. Initial contingents -- 300 to 500 communications specialists, medical personnel and special forces troops -- could soon be heading for the capital city of Kinshasa. But once they arrive, they will still be about 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) from the epicenter of the conflict in the country's east.

Kinshasa was once dubbed Kin la belle -- Kinshasa the Beautiful. But in recent years the city of six million has turned into a giant slum, a melting pot for hundreds of thousands of refugees from all over the country, an incubator for crime, prostitution and disease. "The German soldiers will need a strong mandate, otherwise nothing will change," says Moreau.

But despite Kinshasa's urban woes, most of the violence in the country's civil war happens deep in the world's second-largest rain forest region. The region is so remote that witnesses, not to mention photos, rarely emerge from the jungle.

Writing before the current war erupted, Swiss novelist Urs Widmer painted a Kafkaesque picture of the jungle region between the Ebola River in the northwest and Katanga in the southeast: "The entire heart of Africa is forest. Green, humid, endless. You can spend years hacking your way forward with a machete, and you'll still be in the jungle. There is no way out. No memory and no future."

The International Rescue Committee, a US-based aid organization, estimates that the Congo war has claimed the lives of between 3 million and 4.7 million people since 1998, most succumbing to the consequences of war, such as disease and malnutrition. That would make it the bloodiest conflict since the end of World War II. Armies from six nations have marauded over the territory of Africa's third-largest nation at one time or another, but the Rwandans are the most notorious.

Rwanda, Congo's small neighbor, is deeply divided between two ethnic groups -- the Hutu majority, which makes up about 85 percent of the population, and the Tutsi minority, accounting for about 14 percent.

In 1994, members of the then Hutu-dominated government launched a campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing. During the ensuing three months of genocide, Hutu militias calling themselves Interahamwe ("those who attack together") massacred as many as 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In July 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi guerilla group led by current President Paul Kagame, managed to take over the government in Kigali. The RPF exacted bloody revenge on the Hutus, driving hundreds of thousands of refugees, including innocent women and children, into neighboring Congo.

Of a refugee population that once numbered three million, about 60,000 remain hidden today somewhere in the Congolese forests. In an interview with SPIEGEL, President Kagame claimed that his government is working "on a solution to this problem."

Copper, coltan, diamonds and tropical hardwoods

Kagame's Tutsis now rule Rwanda with an iron fist. Political parties and human rights organizations are banned, journalists locked up and elections rigged. But the Tutsi dictatorship has also taken the law into its own hands beyond Rwanda's borders, launching two attacks into Congo in recent years: first, in 1996, in a move to oust Kinshasa's kleptocratic President Mobutu Sese Seko and then, in 1998, in a supposed effort to capture men from the Interahamwe. But the Rwandan army's true targets were the natural resources in Congo, a country 90 times the size of Rwanda: copper and coltan, diamonds and tropical hardwoods.

According to a report submitted to the UN Security Council, in 1999 Rwanda derived 80 percent of its annual $320 million military budget from the proceeds of stolen Congolese minerals. At times the Kagame regime has earned $20 million in monthly revenues from coltan exports. Between 1998 and 2000, the country's diamond exports miraculously jumped from 166 to 30,500 carats.

In a confidential report, a panel of UN experts recently complained about Uganda's and Rwanda's refusal to disclose their dealings in Congo. Because of this lack of transparency, no one knows what will happen on Congo's election day -- or how Rwanda will react if its puppet, Azarias Ruberwa, loses the post of vice president.