Stephen Lewis
13 September 2007
document
Nairobi — In this statement, former UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa and current Co-Director of AIDS-Free World Stephen Lewis calls for a new UN initiative to end sexual violence in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
On Monday of this week, John Holmes, the UN Emergency Coordinator and Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs returned from a trip to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and characterized sexual violence against women as “almost unimaginable”. He termed it a “weapon of terror”, adding that the intensity and frequency is worse than anywhere else in the world.
That’s pretty strong language coming from a UN official, many of whom are given to the sonorous dispassion of diplomacy. But as frontal were the words of John Holmes, he was positively reserved compared to others.
Nor were the words a revelation. They were simply the latest installment in an ongoing litany of horror.
Last month, August 6th to be exact, Eve Ensler, celebrated author of “The Vagina Monologues” held a press conference to seek support for the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, DRC, where women who have been subjected to sexual violence are treated. She had just completed a visit to eastern Congo, and wrote an extraordinary magazine piece which began with the words, “I have just returned from hell. I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo … How do I convey these stories of atrocities … How do I tell you of girls as young as nine raped by gangs of soldiers, of women whose insides were blown apart by rifle blasts and whose bodies now leak uncontrollable streams of urine and feces?”
There follows an incomparably blood-chilling account of interviews with survivors of rape and sexual violence … violence so insanely savage as to reverberate with Hitlerian brutality. When I read Eve Ensler, I was shaken to the core.
Interestingly, in advance of Eve Ensler, the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, felt exactly the same way. Just a week earlier, July 30, 2007, the rapporteur, Professor Yakin Erturk, returned from an official visit to the DRC conducted between July 16th and July 27th.
In a public statement, preliminary to a full report, she writes of the roaming gangs of psychopaths in the eastern Congo: “The atrocities perpetrated by these armed groups are of an unimaginable brutality that goes far beyond rape. The atrocities are structured around rape and sexual slavery and aim at the complete physical and psychological destruction of women with implications for the entire society …Women are brutally gang raped, often in front of their families and communities. In numerous cases, male relatives are forced at gun point to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters. Frequently women are shot or stabbed in their genital organs after they are raped. Women who survived months of enslavement told me that their tormentors had forced them to eat excrement or the human flesh of murdered relatives.”
I note that this is the language of a formally-appointed UN rapporteur, delivered to a formal UN body. Absolutely nothing has come of it.
In February of 2007, here in Nairobi, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in conjunction with the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) published an astonishingly comprehensive and powerful monograph, with extensive narrative and searing photographs, titled “The Shame of War: Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in Conflict”. It is, without doubt, one of the finest publications, in content and analysis, that the United Nations has produced in many a year.
The monograph followed an earlier publication by OCHA/IRIN in 2005, called “Broken Bodies, Broken Dreams”, an initial compilation dealing with gender-based violence. The point to be made is that even though both texts covered sexual violence in several war zones, the material dealing with DRC was enough to sound the highest-decibel alarm.
For example, this excerpt from The Shame of War: “As a result of the systematic and exceptionally violent gang rape of thousands of Congolese women and girls, doctors in the DRC are now classifying vaginal destruction as a crime of combat. Many of the victims suffer from traumatic fistula --- tissue tears in the vagina, bladder and rectum. Additional long-term medical complications for survivors may include uterine prolapse (the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond) and other serious injuries to the reproductive system, such as infertility, or complications associated with miscarriages and self-induced abortions. Rape victims are also at high-risk for sexually transmitted infections.”
Alas, OCHA and IRIN were simply repeating, in 2007, what had been endlessly hammered home in the previous years. On November 13th, 2006, the UK newspaper, The Guardian, ran a story under the headline “Hundreds of Thousands Raped in Congo Wars”, reporting on just one province in eastern DRC, South Kivu, where 42,000 women had been treated for rape. In October, 2006, UN Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, reported that “In the eastern Congo, over 12,000 rapes of women and girls have been reported in the last six months.”
But Jean-Marie Guehenno well knows that the number of rapes that go unreported are usually ten or twenty times higher than those that come to official attention, and vastly higher still during a war. Indeed, USG Guehenno was about to receive a report from the Human Rights Division of his own peacekeeping operation in the Congo, known as MONUC, that surveyed “The Human Rights Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the period of July to December, 2006.” In the section of the report headed “Sexual Violence”, there is a catalogue of depraved and ferocious assaults on women that makes the blood run cold.
Thus: “Despite all initiatives undertaken to counter sexual violence … rape continues to be widespread throughout the country.”
Thus: “Throughout the country, young and old women, pregnant women and girls as young as six were allegedly raped at roadblocks and in private homes, on their way home from school or in the fields.”
Thus: “In Ituri, where the local population suffers hardships caused by the continuous military operations against armed groups … the (security forces) have carried out brutal acts of sexual violence in a legal vacuum without being held responsible for their actions.”
There’s more, much more.
It’s no wonder, then, that Jan Egeland, the former UN Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told the Security Council in September of 2006 that sexual violence in the DRC was a “cancer that seemed to be out of control.” He went on to note that the “Congo is the world’s deadliest crisis since the Second World War. Yet Congo’s immense suffering has gone virtually unnoticed by the outside world.”
At the outset of 2006, however, it did not escape the notice of the highly-esteemed medical journal, The Lancet. In the issue of January 7th, there appeared a learned article, “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: a nationwide survey”. The authors examined mortality rates between January 2003 and April 2004, and came to the conclusion, by extrapolation, that the total death toll, 1998-2004 was 3.9 million. It would doubtless be closer to 5 million today. In the introduction to the article, the authors argue that “… the war began in 1998 and quickly engulfed the country in a conflict characterized by extreme violence, mass population displacements, widespread rape, and a collapse of public health services. The outcome has been a humanitarian disaster unmatched by any other in recent decades, but one that has drawn little response from the international community.”
It is a self-evident truth that there is a terrifying pattern here, evolving over many years, and the most terrifying component of that pattern, the one unbroken stream of nightmare continuity, is the sexual violence.
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