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Epidemic of brutal sexual violence plagues the region where women are being raped with impunity.
By Lisa Clifford and Charles Ntiricya in Goma (AR No. 148, 19-Dec-07)
In
the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, where thousands of rapes are committed
each year and sexual violence is the norm, Marie Jeanne’s story is all too
familiar.
She was raped three weeks ago in the Rutshuru district of the eastern North
Kivu province by four soldiers from the Congolese army. “I lost my virginity. I
don’t know whether I have AIDS. And who’s going to marry me?” said the
19-year-old from a hospital in the provincial capital Goma.
Marie Jeanne still has the support of her family, unlike Jeanette, 20, who was
raped one evening by a member of the local militia in her village. Jeanette’s
family have rejected her, saying she offered herself to her attacker.
An epidemic of brutal sexual violence is plaguing the eastern Congo where women
like Marie Jeanne and Jeanette are being raped with impunity by all sides in
the conflict between a renegade general, rival militias and the Congolese army.
“Sexual violence is being perpetrated by all armed groups,” said Anneke Van
Woudenberg, Congo researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It is clear that women are
completely unprotected at the moment. No one can claim they are unaware that
rape is being used as a weapon of war in eastern Congo.”
Justine Masika works for a Goma-based NGO that helps victims of sexual violence
in North Kivu. She joined the group, Synergie des femmes pour les victimes des
violences sexuelles, SFVS, after being asked to help an 80-year-old woman who
had been raped. The woman later died of her injuries.
Masika estimates there have been 14,000 rapes in North Kivu since 2004, around
1,400 in the past six months alone. SFVS – which arranges counseling, morning
after pills and operations on injuries like fistulas, rips in the vaginal wall
caused by rape – has helped thousands of rape victims including a ten-month old
baby.
Most are rural dwellers, attacked while they are working in the fields or
fetching water but young boys have also fallen victim to the violence, with
Masika’s group documenting nearly 40 boys raped this year in North Kivu.
The rapists are attempting to weaken or destroy communities, she says, using
sexual violence to terrorise or implement their own agendas. “It’s a strategy
of war,” said Masika.
Though rape has long been a tactic of Congo’s warring parties, Masika says the
problem is worse now than in the past. Though the vast majority of rapes are
committed by members of armed grounds, Masika says civilians are increasingly
responsible for sexual violence, some of whom are demobilised militia members.
“During the wars of the Nineties there was rape but the perpetrators were
severely punished, expelled from their communities,” she said. “But in areas
where there has been so much conflict impunity has set in. Civilians now see it
as behaviour they can get away with.”
NGO workers say that rather than being driven from communities as they would
have been in the past, it is now common for the families of victims and
perpetrators to instead work out compensation deals. “Rapists give the family
of their victims two goats in compensation,” said Masika.
Chantal, a 28-year-old mother of six, was raped by nine soldiers in a field in
the Masisi district. She says the men were soldiers loyal to the Tutsi general
Laurent Nkunda, who controls the area and is fighting the Congolese army in the
province.
She was taken to a hospital in Goma where she remains, in terrible pain,
abandoned by her family. Chantal says her tormentors are still walking free -
she fears raping other women. “What have I done to deserve this pain?” she
asks.
Chantal, like most Congolese rape victims, sees no point in turning to the
country’s courts for redress. Masika says Chantal’s lack of faith in a system
where justice is available to the highest bidder is typical. Only 200 of the
thousands of women she has helped have dared to legally pursue their attackers.
Another major problem is lack of access to the legal system. There are courts
in the North Kivu towns of Goma, Butembo and Beni, but most women are attacked
in rural areas, miles from the nearest police station, court house or lawyer.
Rejusco, a European-funded organisation to help resurrect the ailing justice
system in Congo’s east, estimates only two per cent of sexual violence victims
have access to legal assistance. Dirk Deprez, coordinator at Rejusco in Goma,
says a new law on sexual violence passed by parliament in 2006 and designed to
speed up the prosecution of rape cases and impose stiffer penalties has had
little effect.
“It was an ambitious law in an understaffed and underequipped system,” said
Deprez. “It was a symbolic victory for those working on sexual violence, but we
don’t see a lot happening in the field since the law came out.”
Van Woudenberg agrees the deck is stacked against women who want to bring
charges of rape. “The investigation is never properly conducted,” she said.
“There are hardly any women magistrates or investigators. Women are treated so
badly when they raise these issues and when they go through court proceedings.”
In a recent report, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against
women said the scale and brutality of the sexual violence in the Congo amounts
to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Individual acts of rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced
pregnancy, enforced sterilisation and any other form of sexual violence
constituting a grave breach or serious violation of the Geneva Conventions can
be prosecuted as war crimes, if they occur during either international or
internal armed conflict.
That could be where the ICC comes in. With the Congolese legal system in chaos,
it will likely be the Hague-based court that will hold to account some of those
accused of sexual violence in North Kivu and elsewhere in the country.
Masika sends her evidence on sexual crimes committed in North Kivu to the
court, which is in the process of selecting its third investigation in Congo. If
that will be in North Kivu is not yet known. However, the ICC said recently
that it is gathering information on crimes committed by all sides there
including rape, forced displacement, killings and enlisting child soldiers.
Beatrice Le Frapper Du Hellen, the head of the ICC division working with
governments to secure cooperation, told IWPR that the court is aware of the
culture of sexual violence in the eastern Congo, which she described as
“massive, massive shocking brutality”.
“It is being used absolutely routinely with such brutality, even against very
young children, that there has to be an objective in such brutality,” she said.
The ICC has one Congolese militia leader in custody – Germain Katanga – accused
of sexual slavery, among other things
In Uganda, Joseph Kony and Vincent Otti from the Lord’s Resistance Army are
charged with rape and sexual enslavement while two Sudanese indictees – Ahmed
Harun and Ali Kosheyb – are accused of 51 crimes against humanity and war
crimes including rape. In the ICC’s ongoing investigation in the Central
African Republic, allegations of sexual crimes far outnumber alleged killings.
“With our case against Katanga we have said very clearly that sexual violence
is prosecuted by the ICC,” said Le Frapper. “If anybody thought that sexual
violence is a crime that isn’t going to be prosecuted, look at Katanga, look at
the Central African Republic, look at Joseph Kony, look at Harun.”
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