I don’t really know what to say about this article about rape in the Congo. Rape has long been used as a tool of war and particularly of genocide, but most people interviewed for this article seem to believe that the attacks in the Congo have hit unprecedented levels. And the descriptions are heartbreaking (rape/violence trigger warning):
Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.
Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.
“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.”
There are a number of perpetrators, but government soldiers are among the worst. Some also blame former Hutu militiamen who fled Rwanda after the genocide. But now it’s gone beyond rape during war, and escalated to a widespread culture of violence against women:
“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”
Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.
At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.
“I still have pain and feel chills,” said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband’s chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.
Even with UN Peacekeepers, few of the culprits are caught and almost none are punished.
I wish I had some insight, but sometimes there’s just nothing to say.
Oh god. What is happening to us?
This is definitely one of those things that should be on everyone’s radar.
I’m so glad you said “us” there. While I applaud the effort to highlight these kinds of atrocities I think there’s a tendency by the general public to look at Africa’s ills as merely a result of Africans themselves. In reality much of the horrors found in Africa can be traced back to both colonialism and later interference ( to put it mildly) by the so called advanced nations, including the good old U.S. The horror that exists in so many areas in Africa is one “we” not only created but continue to ignore and even enable to advance our own interests. We taught them hate, we taught them violence, and it serves us well to have them brutally fighting eachother rather than uniting together against us and for themselves. That does not excuse the horrors occurring now, but I think it certainly helps to explain them, at least to some extent.
Oh, my God, yes, I read this article in the New York Times this morning, too. It was horrific. Made me feel like the most spoiled, overprivileged, whiney blogger the world has ever seen.
One aspect of this which I see the New York Times isn’t mentioning:
In the Congo, abortion is illegal, unless a doctor decides that a pregnancy could be fatal for the mother.
Some of these medical teams perform abortions anyway: some don’t. Any who do, are breaking the law.
Amnesty International’s decision, earlier this year, to campaign for a woman’s right to choose abortion as a human rights issue, when a woman has been raped, especially when the rape occurred in a war zone, was specifically fuelled by the fact that a woman in the Congo who has been raped is not legally allowed to terminate any pregnancy that results.
The Catholic Church’s opposition to that decision, and new disassociation from Amnesty International, is based on their belief that these women – already raped and abused – ought to be forced by law through pregnancy and childbirth: which practice the UN says is torture.
That’s not something the New York Times wants to promote, obviously, but it’s part of the story.
Four years ago my wife (we are a lesbian couple) and I started sponsoring a 14 year old girl from the Congo through her schooling and hospital treatment here in Holland. She had been brought here after an aid agency found her in the bush having been gang raped and sodomized so furiously that she had been torn open from vagina to anus. She had then been beaten so badly that she barely had any hearing left. The soldiers who raped her had then removed her eyes with a spoon! Last year she graduated from school and obtained her baccalaureate. The Dutch government gave her indefinite leave to remain in Holland last year and next she will be able to apply for citizenship. She is now working for a translation company here in Holland. She is the bravest person I have ever known.
As to the Catholic Church, there primary concern is the perpetuation of the power of the church over women, it is nothing more than a misogynistic boys club
I don’t have the words to express my deep sadness at these horrors.
Judith van der Roos: As to the Catholic Church, there primary concern is the perpetuation of the power of the church over women, it is nothing more than a misogynistic boys club
Sure. But what motivates the New York Times to avoid the point? So far as I can see the media deals with the rapes in the Congo as if they were a totally separate issue from what’s being tagged as Amnesty International’s “pro-abortion” stance.
(BTW: Congratulations on your wonderful daughter!)