Women in the eastern Congo are experiencing sexual violence on a scale never seen before. One gynecologist in the town of Bukavu estimates he sees ten girls and women a day, who come to his clinic as victims of rape.
Their reproductive and digestive systems are often beyond repair, having not only been sexually assaulted but brutalized from the inside out by bayonets and pieces of wood. The United Nations counts 27 000 sexual assaults reported in South Kivu Province in 2006. That is only one region and those are only the cases being reported.
They say in one town alone, called Shabunda, 70 percent of the women have reported being raped. In almost all cases, the attackers are described as young men with guns. There is no shortage of people fitting this description: There are poorly paid government soldiers, homegrown militias called Mai-Mai and members of paramilitary groups from Uganda and Rwanda roaming the countryside. Although the Second Congo War officially ended in 2003 when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power, these changes have neither unified the country nor strengthened the government against renegade forces. One of the newest groups to emerge is one calling itself the Rastas, a gang of dreadlocked men who hide out in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Lakers jerseys and have become renowned for burning babies, kidnapping women and cutting anyone who gets in their way to pieces. UN officials believe these so-called Rastas are ex-Hutu militia men from Rwanda who left after the 1994 genocide.
But no one group is exclusively guilty of the sexual violence. Rape victims have accused men from all camps, militia men and Congolese forces, alike. And the violence continues despite the largest UN peacekeeping force, involving more than 17,000 troops. Recent UN initiatives to protect the women include “night flashes” where three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night to signal to both civilians and armed groups that they are there. In the morning, one sometimes sees up to 3 000 villagers curled around the trucks. “We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.” (New York Times)
This article was published Thursday, October 11, 2007.
