New York Post Online Edition

The Most Unconventional Weapon: "Fetishism can't explain why, according to testimony given to U.N. investigators, M.L.C. troops forced one woman to eat from her husband's corpse. It can't explain why some victims were ordered to swallow their own ears or toes, why Kakule had to eat the less desirable parts of his assistant's body alongside his captors or why, after the butchering of a Protestant priest, others were forced to pay money or eat his flesh -- or be butchered themselves. The inflicting of vengeance and spreading of terror -- aspects of war that are as modern as they are ancient -- have played a part in Congo's cannibalism. A Human Rights Watch report released in July suggests that ''perpetrators have found that fear of cannibalism terrorizes victims more effectively into compliance with their orders than does the simple fear of death, so frequently faced in daily life.''

But to travel on the visa sold in Beni, to travel around the northeast, is to be taught that by eating another man's heart (especially the heart of a Pygmy, whose people are considered the original tribe of the country, possessors of a primal strength), a man can make himself bulletproof. It is to be taught that only such cannibalism, along with the gris-gris of traditional priests, allowed the M.L.C. to come so close to seizing the town. It is to feel, in the Congolese ways of seeing the world, the pervasive hold of the atavistic, the magical."