Dongo sits on the left bank of the Ubangi River in the Sud-Ubangi District, its frontier with the Republic of the Congo just across the water. By November 2009, the town had emptied. At least 16,000 civilians had crossed to the other side, and the streets held no one. Even members of the Congolese navy -- the very people tasked with patrolling the river -- fled with their families. They had neither weapons nor ammunition to protect themselves, let alone anyone else. The violence spread outward. On November 20, attackers destroyed the village of Buburo, including the UNHCR offices, though both the villagers and the UN staff had already evacuated. By month's end, more than 70,000 people were displaced, scattered among temporary shelters in towns like Kungu, Bokonzi, Bomboma, and Bonzene, or huddled on the far bank of the Ubangi in the Republic of the Congo.

Behind the escalation was an animist priest named Udjani, whose followers included former members of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, the rebel group led by Jean-Pierre Bemba during the Second Congo War of 1998 to 2003. Those old fighters had never fully demobilized, and Dongo's chaos gave them a cause. Udjani's supporters patrolled the Ubangi River in boats, shooting at barges packed with civilians trying to escape -- turning the river that was supposed to be an escape route into a killing zone. By December 10, the conflict had left at least 100 dead and driven 115,000 from their homes, two-thirds of them into the Republic of the Congo. An anti-government rebel group calling itself the Resistance Patriots of Dongo was declared by Ambroise Lobala Mokobe, though it appeared to have little real presence on the ground. The conflict's roots were local, but its fuel was the unfinished business of the Congo's wars.

The United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, known as MONUC, scrambled to respond. On December 13, the Congolese army recaptured Dongo from fighters who turned out to be a mix of former soldiers, deserters, and ex-members of the old Zairean army who had been living across the border. Three days later, at the weekly MONUC press conference, spokesperson Madnodje Mounoubai announced the first deployment of 500 peacekeeping troops to Dongo and nearby Bozene. The force was remarkably international: Ghanaian, Tunisian, and Egyptian contingents alongside Guatemalan Special Forces, supported by armored personnel carriers, transport helicopters, and combat helicopters. It was a small army assembled from four continents to stabilize a town most of those soldiers had never heard of a month earlier.

The humanitarian aftermath was staggering in its logistics. Refugees were dispersed across 500 square kilometers of riverbank, making organized aid delivery almost impossible. The UNHCR, working with local staff, set up nine clinics near the densest concentrations of displaced people, supplemented by mobile medical centers for those in more remote stretches. Near Betou in the northern Republic of the Congo, about 40 kilometers north of Dongo, aid agencies installed six large water tanks holding 60,000 liters. The displaced fled in two waves: first from the rebels' advance, then from the army's counterattack. By December 22, the total count reached 168,000 people uprooted by a conflict that had started over fish ponds -- a reminder that in a region scarred by decades of war, the smallest spark can trigger displacement on a massive scale. For the people of Dongo, the Ubangi River was both lifeline and border, the route of escape and the barrier to return.