WUNRN
Congo: War Against Women
The
Use Of Rape As A Weapon In Congo's Civil War
Jan.
13, 2008
(CBS) Right now there's a war
taking place in the heart of Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
more people have died there than in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur combined.
You probably haven't heard much about it, but as CNN's Anderson Cooper
reports, it's the deadliest conflict since World War II. Within the last ten
years, more than four million people have died and the numbers keep rising.
As Cooper and a 60 Minutes team found when they went there a few
months ago, the most frequent targets of this hidden war are women. It is, in
fact, a war against women, and the weapon used to destroy them, their families
and whole communities, is rape.
Dr. Denis Mukwege is the director of Panzi Hospital in Eastern Congo. In this
war against women, his hospital is the frontline. One of the latest victims
he’s treating is Sifa M'Kitambala. She was raped just two days before the team
arrived by soldiers who raided her village.
"They just cut her at many places," Dr. Mukwege explains.
Sifa was pregnant, but that didn't stop her rapists. Armed with a machete, they
even cut at her genitals.
In the last ten years in Congo, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped,
most of them gang raped. Panzi Hospital is full of them.
"All these women have been raped?" Cooper asked Dr. Mukwege, standing
near a very large group of women waiting.
All the women, the doctor says, have been patients of his.
Within a week, Dr. Mukwege says this room will be filled with new faces, new
victims.
"You know, they're in deep pain. But it's not just physical pain. It's
psychological pain that you can see. Here at the hospital, we've seen women
who've stopped living," Dr. Mukwege explains.
And not all the people the hospital treats are adults. "There are
children. I think the youngest was three years old," Mukwege says.
"And the oldest was 75."
To understand what is happening here, you have to go back more than a decade,
when the genocide that claimed nearly a million lives in neighboring Rwanda
spilled over into Congo. Since then, the Congolese army, foreign-backed rebels,
and home-grown militias have been fighting each other over power and this land,
which has some of the world's biggest deposits of gold, copper, diamonds, and
tin. The United Nations was called in and today their mission is the largest
peacekeeping operation in history.
Since 2005, some 17,000 UN troops and personnel have cobbled together a fragile
peace. Last year they oversaw the first democratic election in this country in
40 years. But now all they have accomplished is at risk. Fighting has broken
out once again in Eastern Congo and the region threatens to slip into all out
war.
Each new battle is followed by pillaging and rape; entire communities are
terrorized. Forced to flee their homes, people take whatever they can, and walk
for miles in the desperate hope of finding food and shelter. Over the last
year, more than 500,000 people have been uprooted. A fraction of them make it
to cramped camps, where they depend on UN aid to survive.
One camp Cooper visited sprang up just two months before. It was already
overcrowded, but more people kept arriving. They would go there seeking refuge,
a safe haven, but the truth is in Congo, for women, there’s no such thing. Even
in these supposedly protected camps, women are raped every single day.
"Has rape almost become the norm here?" Cooper asks Anneka Van
Woudenberg, who is the senior Congo researcher at Human Rights Watch.
"I think because of the widespread nature of the war, because there has
been so much violence, rape is now on a daily basis - rape is the norm,"
Van Woudenberg replies.
"Women get raped in wars all the time. How is it different here?"
Cooper asks.
"I think what's different in Congo is the scale and the systematic nature
of it, indeed, as well, the brutality. This is not rape because soldiers have
got bored and have nothing to do. It is a way to ensure that communities accept
the power and authority of that particular armed group. This is about showing
terror. This is about using it as a weapon of war," she explains.
It's hard to imagine this war happening in the midst of such breathtaking
natural beauty and abundance. But after decades of dictatorship and corruption,
the country is broken. Most of the fighting and the raping takes place in
remote areas difficult to get to.
Cooper and the team headed to an isolated village in the mountains in Eastern
Congo called Walungu. For years there's been armed groups fighting in this
region; thousands of men emerge from the forest to terrorise villages and steal
women. Congo’s government seems unable or unwilling to stop them.
In some villages as many as 90 percent of the women have been raped; men in the
villages are usually unarmed, and incapable of fighting back. In Walungu the
team found 24-year-old Lucienne M’Maroyhi. She was at home one night with her
two children and her younger brother, when six soldiers broke in. They tied her
up and began to rape her, one by one.
"I was lying on the ground, and they gave a flashlight to my younger
brother so that he could see them raping me," she recalls.
"They were telling your brother to hold the flashlight?" Cooper asks.
"Yes," she says. "They raped me like they were animals, one
after another. When the first one finished, they washed me out with water, told
me to stand up, so the next man could rape me."
She was convinced they'd kill her, just as soldiers had murdered her parents
the year before. Instead, they turned to her brother. "They wanted him to
rape me but he refused, and told them, 'I cannot do such a thing. I cannot rape
my sister.' So they took out their knives and stabbed him to death in front of
me," she recalls.
Lucienne was then dragged through the forest to the soldier's camp. She was
forced to become their slave and was raped every day for eight months. All the
while, she had no idea where her children were.
"Did you know if they were alive or dead?" Cooper asks.
"I was thinking that they had killed. I didn’t think I would find them
alive," she replies.
Finally, Lucienne escaped. Back in her village she found her two little girls
were alive. But she also learned that she was pregnant. She was carrying the
child of one of her rapists. Lucienne's husband abandoned her. That happens to
rape survivors all over Congo.
"I used to think that when men fled they were irresponsible, but now I
understand things differently,” Dr. Mukwege tells Cooper. “They haven't fled
because their wives have been raped, but because they feel they've been raped.
They have been traumatized…humiliated…because they weren’t able to do anything
to protect their wives and children."
"When a woman is raped, it's not just her that's raped. It's the entire
community that's destroyed," says Judithe Registre, who is with an
organization called "Women for Women." They run support groups for
survivors of rape.
"When they take a woman to rape her, they'll line up the family, they'll
line up other members of the communities to actually witness that,"
Registre says. "They make them watch. And so, what that means for that
particular woman when it's all over, is that total shame, personally, to have
been witnessed by so many people as she's being violated."
Many of the women in Dr. Mukwege’s hospital are not only blamed for what
happened to them, they are shunned because of fears they’ve contracted HIV and
shunned because their rapes were so violent they can no longer control their
bodily functions.
Dr. Mukwege says he's doing about five surgeries a day.
His patients often have had objects inserted into their vaginas, like broken
bottles, bayonets. Some women have even been shot between the legs by their
rapists.
"Why would somebody do that? Why would somebody shoot a woman
inside?" Cooper asks.
"In the beginning I was asking myself the same question. This is a show of
force, of power, it's done to destroy the person," Dr. Mukwege says.
"Sex is being used to commit evil. People flee. They become refugees. They
can't get help, they become malnourished and it's disease which finishes them
off."
Asked what he can tell a young girl about her future, Dr. Mukwege says,
"The most difficult thing is when there is nothing I can do. When I see a
16-year-old, a pretty 16-year-old who's had everything destroyed, and I tell
her that I have to give her a colostomy bag…that is difficult."
Despite those difficulties, more often than not, Dr. Mukwege is able to repair
the damage to these women’s bodies. They see him as a miracle worker, one of
the only men they can trust.
While Dr. Mukwege gives Cooper a tour of the hospital wards, one of his
patients gives him the thumbs up.
"And now she's very happy," he says, "Very happy."
That reaction not only gives him hope, he says, but also the strength to
continue his work.
Strength is something that few women in Congo lack. They bear the burdens, farm
the fields, and hold the families together, yet nothing it seems is being done
to protect them.
The war is so widespread that rapes are increasingly being committed by
civilians. A few washed out billboards tell men that rape is wrong, but there’s
little evidence Congolese officials take the problem seriously.
In the prosecutor's office, the complaints pile up. We were told a $10 bribe
could get a rape accusation investigated, but few cases ever go to court.
We asked the prosecutor to show us the prison, to see how many rapists were
actually behind bars, but when we got there, we were in for a surprise. The
prison had no fences, and the guards had been kicked out. The inmates had taken
over the asylum.
"The fact is the justice system is on its knees in Congo," says Van
Woudenberg, the human rights investigator. "I can count on one hand the
number of cases that we're aware of that have been brought to trial. Literally
here people get away with rape, they get away with murder. The chances of being
arrested are nil."
There may be no justice in Congo, but there are organisations trying to help
rape survivors get back on their feet. "Women For Women" teaches
survivors how to make soap, how to cook - skills they can use to earn money.
They also learn how to read and write. It is the first time many of these women
have ever been in a classroom - it is their chance for a whole new life.
Remember Lucienne M’Maroyhi? She’s jumped at that chance. She hopes to start
her own business one day.
She is also now the mother of a little baby girl, born a year ago. The father
is one of her rapists, one of the men who killed Lucienne's brother. She named
the girl "Luck."
"I named her Luck because I went through many hardships," she
explains. "I could have been killed in the forest. But I got my life back.
I have hope."
Hope is not something you’d expect Congo’s rape survivors to still cling to.
But they do.
Each morning in Panzi hospital they gather to raise their voices, singing at a
religious service. Our sufferings on earth, they sing, will be relieved in heaven.
Relief in Congo, it seems, is just too much to ask for.
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