1. EYEWITNESS: By David Pratt in Goma as DR Congo tears itself apart

THEY lay strewn across the road, their dried blood soaked into the red clay dust of the African soil. All of them were soldiers, some government, some rebel. One of the dead men lay on his back, inexplicably clutching a plastic jerry can to his chest. Another man, his mouth wide open as if in a contorted, grotesque grin, had lost his left hand; the limb perhaps hacked off or eaten by animals from the bush.

Yet another of the dead soldiers lay huddled in a ditch, almost as if he had lain down in the sweltering Congolese heat for a nap from which he would never wake up.

The road from Goma to Kibumba is a little over 10 miles long, but it is littered with the debris, death and suffering of the most recent blood bath to have gripped eastern Congo.

Here, there are no front lines as such. Instead, just an eerie no-man's land of abandoned village huts, where the positions held by Congolese government forces melt into those of Tutsi rebel fighters loyal to General Laurent Nkunda.

For the past few weeks, Nkunda's seemingly unstoppable march towards Goma has unleashed fighting that in turn created mass panic and left in its wake a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

It was late last Wednesday when I crossed the border from Rwanda into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the city of Goma.

With its skyline dominated by the brooding presence of the still-active volcano known as Nyiragongo, Goma sits on the shores of the giant Lake Kivu. Sometimes it is jokingly referred to as the Congolese Riviera. But the city's charms are skin deep.

Not least because memories still linger here of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that spilled over into Congo and laying down the roots from which this latest conflict has grown.

As darkness fell last Wednesday, there was growing unease among many here and around the world that history might be about to repeat itself.

"Look around you, look in their eyes, people are so afraid," insisted one Tutsi man who, along with his family, had waited hours for the necessary exit documents and visas needed to cross into Rwanda.

Like many Tutsis, he was fleeing to the nearby town of Gisenyi, fearing that Hutus in Goma would carry out reprisals following Nkunda's audacious advance towards the city.

Nkunda, who is thought to have 5000 fighters in his National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), claims to be protecting the minority Tutsi population in the east of Congo from Hutu militias linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

According to Nkunda, the Congolese government collaborates with Hutu rebels. He also insists that there must be direct negotiations with the government about security and his objections to a £3 billion deal that gives China access to the eastern Congo's vast mineral resources.

Whatever Nkunda's motive, the fighting in which he has become embroiled has turned the region into a free fire zone and uprooted hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Along with thousands of Goma's citizens, foreign aid workers swamped the immigration posts on either side of the frontier last week. On the Rwandan side, hotels were full to bursting with those who had made the exodus.

On the road out of Gisenyi heading towards the Rwandan capital Kigali, a stream of 4x4 vehicles drove past filled with staff from international relief agencies that had been evacuated from Goma.

These were only the first signs of the worsening situation to come. Late into the night, bright red lines of tracer fire criss-crossed the sky. Then from around some of the city's neighbourhoods the flat pop-pop sound of Kalashnikov fire and occasional thud of heavier weapons quickly followed.

Across the city, Goma's remaining citizens hunkered down in their homes and improvised refugee camps, convinced that the final showdown between government forces and rebel fighters had finally come.

By daybreak it became apparent that some of the night-time violence had come not from clashes between the two foes but from rampaging Congolese soldiers.

Angry, rogue gangs of soldiers - often drunk and effectively in retreat, having given up the fight against the rebels - were reduced to stealing what they could from homes and shops as panic gripped this tumbledown volcanic town.

In one incident a Goma restaurant owner was shot dead, his bullet-ridden body left lying on the city centre's dusty, lava-blackened streets. At least eight other civilians were also killed.

Despite an announcement that day of a ceasefire by Nkunda, the tension remained high. Here and there, Congolese paramilitary police and army units in pick-up trucks toured streets and alleyways trying to restore order and round up looters.

Alongside the base of the United Nations peacekeeping force (Monuc), a small civilian funeral party unable to find transport carried the coffin of a victim of the recent fighting to a nearby cemetery.

By now almost every public building was crammed full with tens of thousands of civilians who had taken to the road to flee fighting before arriving in Goma.

At Goma's normally bustling airport, the terminal building was deserted of civilian passengers and staff.

Around some of the hangar buildings, Congolese soldiers loaded up vehicles with weapons and ammunition before heading to the front lines.

"We are strong, I'm prepared to die to defend my country against Nkunda," insisted First Sergeant Augustin Falelu; his show of bravado somewhat undermined by his bedraggled appearance and the ageing assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

Just a few yards away, other soldiers who had just returned from the front lines sprawled filthy and exhausted on the ground next to ancient khaki coloured trucks.

One look at these men was enough to tell of the horrors that warfare involves. Many of them were withdrawn and reticent, some clearly traumatised, their eyes bloodshot and breath heavy with the reek of stale alcohol.

Commanding these government soldiers and tasked with defending Goma against Nkunda's rebels is General Mayala Kiama.

A slim, wiry-looking man, Mayala speaks English with a slight American drawl picked up from a stint living in the southern United States.

"Pratt?" he said enquiringly looking at my press card. "I once had a girlfriend called Peggy Pratt when I was in the States," he told me, as we sat down to talk about the task he faced holding out against a rebel army that had by now moved to within nine miles of Goma.

Could his men really be expected to stop Nkunda I asked?

"Why not?" Mayala insisted. "We have all the military hardware, men and material here, so why not?"

As he spoke, a few soldiers kitted out in an assortment of uniforms, some wearing brightly coloured Wellington boots and laden with belts of bullets and machine guns, stood nearby.

I put it to him that to effectively defend Goma, he would require the help of UN troops and that relations between the Congolese army and Monuc have shown signs of strain lately.

Refuting such suggestions, Mayala insisted that there was a "great deal of successful collaboration" between the two forces.

As for the general's views on his rebel adversary he was a little more forthright.

"Nkunda is a Congolese like me and he has his opinions and has chosen to do this," replied Kiama. "But I am a soldier and my head of command has made it clear that my orders are to stop him."

A few days after our meeting, while out on the main road that leads from Goma to Kibumba, the real cost of that military task was terrifyingly apparent.

Journeying into Kibumba, across what passes for a front line here, the roads are still choked with civilians on the move, buckling under the weight of carrying bedding stoves and a few other precious belongings.

Some are still fleeing the fighting; others without food or shelter have no choice but to risk returning to what remains of their looted and burned out homes.

Along the route, makeshift checkpoints thrown up by Nkunda's rebels are manned by mean-looking gunmen, some exotically dressed in garish headgear including one soldier wearing a leopard-patterned cowboy hat.

At the remains of a Monuc base, once manned by Indian peacekeeping troops, the rebels show us the scores of tank shell casings they say are left over from the barrage the UN rained down on Nkunda's men as they advanced towards Goma.

On the outskirts of Goma at a place called Kibati, tens of thousands of civilians, some in appalling physical condition, have set up makeshift shelters and camps along the roadside.

Here food and clean water are scarce and the situation desperate. Aid agencies who left as the security situation deteriorated, are only now trickling back, their return too slow to stem the deepening humanitarian crisis on the ground.

On Friday at a improvised food distribution centre at Kanyarucinya, I watched as chaos ensued when the international relief agency, Mercy Corps, struggled to distribute high energy biscuits to hundreds of displaced civilians who had stood in the rain for hours.

Local staff battled to keep order and were forced to use sticks to hold back many of the women and children who surged forward, fearful of missing out on the meagre supplies. Many tiny children were trampled under foot, while others had some of their rations taken from them by desperate adults.

"We have been living outside in the rain, no food, no water. We can't take much more of this," said Baziramwabo Benita, clutching her baby daughter along with countless other mothers in the Kanyarucinya compound.

Most people she says are terrified of returning to their villages, where the forced recruitment of young men into military service and rape of women has been widespread.

"I'm beginning to think we will never see our homes again, it's too dangerous to return," says Benita, voicing the fear of many Hutus like her, who would need to move back into areas now controlled by Nkunda's Tutsi dominated force.

According to the United Nation Refugee agency UNHCR, some refugee camps near Rutshuru, 55 miles north of Goma, where some 50,000 mainly Hutus lived, were burned to the ground after people were forcibly removed.

"There are some 50,000 people who were in those camps. We don't know where they would be, we're afraid that they may have just dispersed off into the bush," said spokesman Ron Redmond.

For the moment a tentative ceasefire appears to be holding, but similar ceasefires have come and gone in the past.

Out on the Goma to Kibumba road and elsewhere around this beleaguered and long-suffering region, the hardship and suffering of hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians, Hutus and Tutsis alike, goes on. Time is running out if the effects of hunger and disease are not to prevail.

The international community, long haunted by its political and interventionist shortcomings in 1994 at the time of the Rwandan genocide, needs to move fast and effectively to ensure there is no re-run of those dark days. Congo and its troubles have already been ignored for too long.