The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, crosses the front line in the Democratic Republic of Congo's two-year war today to meet with the leadership of the largest, but most unpopular, rebel group.
Mrs Robinson is flying to Goma, the headquarters of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD-Goma), one of three rebel groups fighting to overthrow President Laurent Kabila. She is also due to meet local human rights activists who charge the rebels with abduction and murder and being embroiled in an escalating ethnic mini-war.
The three rebel forces and their sponsors, Rwanda and Uganda, control about half of DRC, the second-largest country in Africa. But the last year has seen relatively little action on the front line, which stretches thousands of miles across some of the densest equatorial forest in the world.
Instead, two sub-conflicts have emerged deep in rebel territory, provoking atrocities on all sides and turning the rebels against the civilians they claim to be liberating.
The RCD has signally failed to win the hearts and minds of the Congolese population. It imposes heavy war taxes yet has failed to pay many civil servants for months, sometimes years. Food prices have shot up while living standards are rapidly declining. Civilians in Goma complain of being regularly harassed and robbed by unpaid RCD soldiers.
"In the beginning the rebels offered freedom from Kabila, whom they accused of being a dictator, a tribalist and not paying the civil servants. But they have done exactly the same thing," said a human rights activist, Mr Jean-Pierre Badidke, in the key RCD-controlled city of Kisangani.
Along the shores of Lake Kivu, popular discontent has led to a resurgence of the Mayi-Mayi, a local resistance militia supplied by President Kabila. Human rights groups in Goma have charged RCD troops with murdering civilians when trying to flush the dissidents from remote villages: similar to the atrocities committed by US soldiers fighting in Vietnam.
The clashes have forced hundreds of thousands of civilians from their villages into overcrowded towns, where disease and malnutrition are rife. Aid agencies warn of a looming humanitarian disaster, although many areas are still too dangerous for aid workers.
An explosive ethnic dimension of the conflict in Kivu has also emerged. There has been a sharp increase in attacks on the Banyamulenge, or Congolese Tutsis, who hold many senior positions in the RCD and are perceived to be puppets of the "Tutsi invaders". Diplomats and United Nations workers are becoming increasingly worried about the emergence of a full-blown ethnic war in south Kivu.
The rebel alliance has also been severely tested since troops engaged in a vicious battle for control of Kisangani in June. Whole neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble after soldiers from Rwanda and Uganda engaged in a bloody running battle, sometimes mounting artillery pieces in the back yards of civilians.
Mr Jean Boyla (32), a customs officer, used to live with his wife and eight relatives in a modest, terraced house in the Tshopo district. But after six days of intense fighting, all that remains is a blackened ruin. Like most civil servants, Mr Boyla has not been paid for two years by the RCD, relying on "donations" from visitors passing through his post. "We have become beggars," he sighed.
Confidence in the rebel movement is wavering even among the faithful. "In the beginning, I thought we had good principles and ideas," said the Kisangani RCD permanent secretary, Mr Mangubu Lotika. "But now when I see the suffering of the population those objectives seem to have been forgotten."