Warning: the details of the sexual violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo given in this article are disturbing.
“Yes, it’s difficult to hear about,” said playwright and activist Eve Ensler in an interview with The Women’s Media Center, “but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear.” The 2009 V-DAY spotlight is not a story of Valentine’s Day love. It addresses the prevalent rape of women by armed groups in an Eastern Congo conflict that has been supposedly “over” since’99.Most people prefer to avoid hearing tales about thousands of women being gang raped, developing fistula, contracting HIV, or having gun barrels and sticks shoved into their vaginas. But these aren’t just tales: they are the true stories of real women. In order to put a stop to practices that have now become commonplace, we must listen and take action.
The’99 Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement officially ended a conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that involved several African nations, a conflict that developed as an outgrowth of the mid-1990s Rwandan genocide. However, foreign troops remain in the Congo today, as do numerous armed groups representing different foreign and domestic interests, as well as ethnic groups. The unending conflict has displaced over two million civilians, caused the deaths of another 2.5 million and the rape of over 200,000 women and girls—taking only the years 1998-2001 under consideration.
Even these horrifying numbers don’t accurately represent the conflict’s true devastation: estimating the true number of women, girls, and boys raped and sexually assaulted is nearly impossible. For fear of being stigmatized or ostracized, victims keep silent about their attacks and refuse to seek medical treatment.
Sexual violence against women and girls has been committed by every armed group in the Eastern Congo, opportunistic bandits, and even a few U.N. troops. Survivors who have sought medical treatment and support tell similar stories: Many were attacked while working in the fields, or kidnapped in looting raids on their villages. Many were subjected to rape more than once, and by multiple men.
Twenty-year-old Generose N., from Kabare told Human Rights Watch her story:
I was on the road from Kalonge to Mudaka. I had money that my fiance gave me to buy a wedding dress. A soldier attacked me on the road. He said things in Kinyarwanda. [Later she said he was Hutu]. He took me away to a place in the forest where there were three other soldiers. They roughed me up. This was August 8 [2001] and they kept me until August 25 and each one of them raped me every day.
This is a far too common story: 3,500 incidents of rape were reported in North and South Kivu (in Eastern Congo) during the first six months of 2008 alone. Fifty percent of the survivors were under the age of five. In the aftermath of the rape, survivors are stigmatized by their community, rejected by their loved ones, and often become pregnant, contract HIV, or develop fistulas. Fistulas are ruptures that appear between the vagina, bladder, and/or rectum, which cause extreme pain and frequently interfere with women’s ability to control her urination and defecation. They can be repaired with a costly surgery—but few women have the ability to travel to a hospital, while underfunded medical centers are already overwhelmed by the treatment of the small percentage of rape victims who do come to them.
Even though rape has unfortunately often been utilized a tool of war, the figures reported in the DRC are of an unprecedented magnitude. Armed groups have used rape to disable community and thereby win and maintain control over territories they claim. After violent rape, many survivors are unable to give birth, and they are often turned away by their fiances and husbands; this, in addition to mass looting and killing, disrupts individual families and whole communities.
I wish I could end this article on a positive note, but I’m afraid that is virtually impossible. Perhaps hope can be found in the increasing numbers of Congolese women now telling their stories to the world in hopes of preventing these acts from reoccurring. More hope might be found in the arrest of Congolese Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, accused of war crimes by numerous human rights groups, in Rwanda earlier this year. His arrest could possibly lead to the punishment of more perpetrators of sexual violence.
A real solution to the crisis must involve the leadership and participation of many nations and the U.N. to demobilize armed groups, achieve a peace settlement, punish war crime offenders, and prevent rape. Hopefully, the awareness raised by the international V-Day spotlight will inspire a renewed effort to stop sexual violence in the Eastern Congo and to end the persistent and devastating conflict.
