When I first started reporting from Africa eight years ago, it was almost impossible to generate any interest in the Western media for a story about Congo. This was immediately following the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the world was still reeling in the aftermath.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have since dominated our news coverage and resources during the first decade of the millennium.

Even as Democratic Republic of Congo’s war-related death toll rose above a staggering five million, making it the most lethal conflict since World War Two, the war in Central Africa remained largely unnoticed and under-reported.

But lately there has been a slight shift. In October 2008, a fresh upsurge of violence drove some 250,000 people from villages in the country’s eastern Kivu provinces, bringing to more than one million the number of internally displaced Congolese.

Congo’s war victims usually perish far from sight, deep in the bush, the latest ghosts in that country’s turbulent history. But last October, the war was accessible. Foreign journalists descended en masse into Goma, a town bordering Rwanda, and booked into hotels with picturesque views of smouldering volcanoes overlooking Lake Kivu.

The media could enjoy coffee and croissants for breakfast, drive up to the front line fighting or the squalid camps home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Congolese, then return to file stories and pictures in time for dinner and a night at the bar.

For the few there among us who had struggled for years trying to generate interest in Congo, the foreign press hoard was a bizarre, yet welcome scene.

I worked as a Reuters text correspondent in Congo and neighbouring Rwanda from late 2001 until late 2004, and have returned frequently since as a photographer, witnessing poverty, cruelty and bloodshed. During that time, I was also humbled by the resilience and generosity of many Congolese and often wished there was more I could do to make the outside world care about them.

The recent widespread media coverage has helped. There were so many photographers in Congo last year that there’s a running joke at photojournalism festivals and competitions this year about viewers and judges having to sit through “yet another picture story from Congo.”

But at least Congo, that beautiful, terrible place, became a highly visible story. It’s easy to be cynical about the idea of a devastating conflict suddenly becoming a trendy cause, but the important thing is that people are finally paying attention to one of the world’s worst catastrophes.

U.S. President Barack Obama referred to Congo’s troubles in speeches, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visited Goma in August and said she was moved by the plight of Congo’s women, many of whom are victims of extreme sexual violence and mass rape.

The conflict is driven by ethnic divisions and fierce competition for control over the country’s vast natural resources, including gold, diamonds, timber and other valuable minerals used in everyday Western gadgets such as mobile phones, remote controls and laptop computers.

Reuters recently organized an exhibition of work I produced while on assignments in Congo late last year and in February 2009. The exhibition, which includes sound, text and graphics outlining the conflict’s root causes and main players, opened October 9 at the War Correspondent’s Festival in Bayeux, France.

The festival is held in Normandy, not far from the site of the D-Day invasions and the historic scenes recorded by Robert Capa’s grainy images of the beach landings.

The venue for the Reuters Congo exhibition, which runs until November 1, is the Bayeux chapel in the same grand compound as the Bayeux Tapestry, a thousand year-old, 70 meter-long embroidered cloth depicting in images the Norman conquest of England. In such a context, the festival’s exhibitions take on greater significance.

While any war brings pain, loss and misery, the photographs we selected for the Congo exhibition aimed to explore not only these aspects, but also the strength of the Congolese people I’ve grown to admire. Shooting frequently with a very low depth of field, I wanted to extract my subjects from their surroundings and portray them as individuals with names and stories that matter.

Often in Congo death seems all around. But so too does life. I hope visitors to the show will not pity the people portrayed, but respect and feel connected to them, as I do.

Among those who attended the opening was Deo Namujimbo, a Congolese journalist whose brother, Didace Namujimbo, was shot and killed last year in the eastern town of Bukavu while working as a reporter for a United Nations radio station.

Deo fought for his brother’s murderers to be brought to justice, but after countless death threats himself, he fled with his family to neighbouring Burundi. Deo’s wife and children remain there as refugees while he now lives in exile in France, writing articles and reporting on the litany human rights abuses in Congo.

Deo thanked Reuters for putting on the exhibition. He didn’t need to. The show is about people exactly like him – Congolese who have suffered and lost. People who have fled their homes and been separated from their families, yet who persevere and hope that one day things will eventually get better.

For further work from Finbarr in Congo click on the following links.

- Full selection of images being exhibited

- Death all Around multimedia

- Congo Hairstyles

On Jan. 14 Reuters hosted a live video Q&A with our renowned photographer Finbarr O’Reilly about his experiences in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Finbarr addressed what drew him to Africa and the most difficult aspects of being a photographer in a war zone.

Finbarr is still available to answer questions, submit them in the comments section below or send a Twitter message with the hash tag “#finbarr” .

Check out “Death all around,” his multimedia report from a Congolese refugee camp, dispatches from Chad and Afghanistan, selected photos from his portfolio, and an audio slideshow from his most recent Congo assignment.

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On my latest trip to report on Congo’s seemingly unending cycle of violence, I wanted to go beyond generic images of downtrodden refugees and brutal conflict.

I spent two years in Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda from 2002 to 2004, covering the regional war that engulfed much of central Africa, and I grew to admire the strength and humour of the long-suffering Congolese.

I returned in November to cover the rebel offensive on the eastern town of Goma. When heavy gunfire erupted while I was photographing at Kibati refugee camp, I was quickly offered shelter in a flimsy tent by Boniface Buhoro, a tailor trying to protect his sister and three-year-old son.

Such kindness is typical of Congo ʼs resilient population, subject to miserable circumstances, misrule and war. Refugees frequently offered warm greetings, friendly smiles and handshakes in squalid camps where they may not have eaten for days.

Amid the chaos of fighting, people fleeing their homes and the demand for quick news pictures, I tried to slow things down by taking intimate portraits.

By shooting with a very low depth of field, I hoped to extract my subjects from their surroundings and portray them as individuals with names and stories that matter.

More than five million people have died, most from lack of access to food or basic health, during a decade of fighting in Congo. This makes Congo ’s enduring conflict the deadliest since World War Two.

Most of the victims perish far from sight, deep in the bush. This time, death seemed all around.

Driving to the front line early one morning, mist hung over the road and smoke from Nyiragongo volcano darkened the sky.

Marking the first rebel position were the bodies of two government soldiers, a bullet through each of their skulls.

Traveling north later, I reached the hilltop village of Kirumba , where local Mai-Mai militiamen had clashed with government troops fleeing the Tutsi rebel advance.

The army quickly buried their dead, but the Mai-Mai corpses were set on fire by beer-drinking troops.

I found them the next morning, fat still bubbling on one charred corpse, its genitals cut off. Another body had an umbrella stabbed into its face. Soldiers joked and laughed.

Back near Kibati camp, I followed a funeral procession into a sun-dappled banana grove. A tiny purple casket containing the body of eight-month old Alexandrine Kabitsebangumi, who had died from cholera, was being lowered into the dark earth.

The grove was filled with graves. As women sang a haunting hymn, the mourners moved aside, allowing me to photograph.

There’s no joy getting a good picture from a baby’s funeral.

Another victim, another memory, another ghost.

Congo is still defined by Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness, which described “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” The horror Conrad depicts in his haunting novel, written more than a century ago, lingers today, with Belgian colonial greed replaced by rapacious warlords and profiteers still raping the nation’s vast resources at a great human toll.

But signs of hope linger. I covered the tumultuous run-up to 2006 elections and after tense days of photographing riots, mob violence and gun battles in Congo’s capital Kinshasa, I would head not to the nearest bar, but to a dilapidated compound, home to children crippled by polio. There, among dozens of twisted bodies and withered limbs, the day’s tension melted away.

The 100 children at the Stand Proud compound in Kinshasa must rank among the world’s most disadvantaged. Handicapped, impoverished, often rejected or abandoned, and living in Africa’s deadliest war zone, they should have little to celebrate. Instead, the lively “polio kids” offer an oasis of hope, unity and optimism in a vast country marked by despair. Despite their polio-damaged legs, wrapped in casts or makeshift braces fashioned from scrap metal, the children dance enthusiastically to loud Congolese music or challenge visitors to madcap games of soccer.

These moments, along with the brave, resilient people I met in refugee camps define the country’s character more than the misery and violence.

A Congolese refugee in a tattered baseball cap, worn clothes and blue flip-flops begged me for a cigarette at Kibati, a camp for 65,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Congo.

I scolded him, saying smoking was bad for his health, as if anything could be worse for your health than living in this conflict-racked corner of Democratic Republic of Congo.

Machine gun fire erupted nearby and people dived for cover, ducking into rows of flimsy tents made from torn sheets of white plastic stretched over sticks.

“Mister, mister, come lie down in here,” a voice called from one tent as bullets hummed nearby like an electrical current.

I snapped a few blurry pictures of people running before crawling through the curtain door of the tent, where a man and two children huddled on the ground. I kneeled above them and took a few more photographs.

“When you hear gunshots, if you lie flat, you can be OK, but if you stay up like that, paff!” said the man, Boniface Buhoro, a tailor who had fled weeks of combat further north in an area now controlled by anti-government Tutsi rebels.

Several people had already been killed by gunfire in this refugee camp in North Kivu province at the foot of Nyiragongo volcano on the front lines between Congo’s army and advancing rebels. At least two more were killed in the next few days.

For 45 minutes, I lay with my legs intertwined with Buhoro’s, his three-year-old son Sadiki wedged between us.

Army boots crunched past outside over black lava rock as soldiers fired their weapons at full stride.

At first we assumed rebels were attacking, but in fact drunken army troops were fighting each other, shooting randomly.

In the panic, soldiers went from tent to tent robbing refugees who had already lost almost everything, typical behavior for the badly paid and poorly disciplined army.

“Every day, something like this happens. They rob and steal and kill us or rape the girls. We don’t even have anything to eat, but they take what they want,” said Buhoro.

I crawled outside as things calmed down.

The man who’d asked me for a cigarette lay face down.

“He’s dead already — stress,” said someone in the small crowd around the body. He had apparently died of heart seizure.

This is how many Congolese die: if not by the gun, then from conflict-induced illnesses, preventable diseases or hunger in a resource-rich but shattered nation lacking infrastructure.

More than five million people have died, most from lack of access to food or basic health, during a decade of fighting and upheaval in Congo, according to aid agencies. This makes Congo’s enduring conflict the deadliest since World War Two.

I spent two years in Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda from 2002 to 2004, covering the regional war that engulfed much of central Africa. The day I took shelter with Boniface was the first on my latest trip to report again on Congo’s seemingly unending cycle of violence.

Most of the victims perish far from sight, deep in the bush.

This time, death seemed all around.

Driving to the front line early one morning, mist hung over the road and smoke from Nyiragongo volcano darkened the sky.

Marking the first rebel position were the bodies of two government soldiers, a bullet through each of their skulls.

Traveling north later, I reached the hilltop village of Kirumba, where local Mai-Mai militiamen had clashed with government troops fleeing the Tutsi rebel advance.

The army quickly buried their dead, but the Mai-Mai corpses were set on fire by beer-drinking troops.

I found them the next morning, fat still bubbling on one charred corpse, its genitals cut off. Another body had an umbrella stabbed into its face. Soldiers joked and laughed.

Back near Kibati camp, I followed a funeral procession into a sun-dappled banana grove. A tiny purple casket containing the body of eight-month old Alexandrine Kabitsebangumi, who had died from cholera, was being lowered into the dark earth.

The grove was filled with graves. As women sang a haunting hymn, the mourners moved aside, allowing me to photograph.

There’s no joy getting a good picture from a baby’s funeral.

Another victim, another memory, another ghost.

After two weeks, I left Congo, crossing into Rwanda.

As my car climbed the steep hills, providing stunning scenic views back into Congo — that beautiful, terrible place — I passed another procession carrying a body on a bamboo stretcher.

I didn’t stop. I just kept driving.

Photographer Finbarr O’Reilly takes us inside the opening of the Harley-Davidson museum in Milwaukee.