Stephen Lewis
13 September 2007
(Page 3 of 3)
“On May 15 of this year (2001), four heavily armed combatants --- they were Hutu --- came to our house at 9 p.m. Everyone in the neighbourhood had fled. I wanted to hide my children, but I didn’t have time. They took my husband and tied him to a pole in the house. My four-month-old baby started crying and I started breastfeeding him and they left me alone.
They went after my daughter, and I knew they would rape her. But she resisted and said she would rather die than have relations with them. They cut off her left breast and put it in her hand. They said, “Are you still resisting us?” She said she would rather die than be with them. They cut off her genital labia and showed them to her. She said, “Please kill me.” They took a knife and put it to her neck and then made a long vertical incision down her chest and split her body open. She was crying but finally she died. She died with her breast in her hand.”
The entire world is preoccupied with Darfur. Understandably. But it must be said that between ten and twenty times the number of people have died in the eastern Congo as have died in Darfur. There are more displaced persons in the Eastern Congo than in Darfur. Darfur has been going on for four years; the eastern Congo has been ravaged for ten. And nowhere on this planet is there such a holocaust of horror visited on women and girls.
I’m not suggesting that we choose between the two. That would be invidious nonsense. I am suggesting that the time has come to realize that what is happening in eastern Congo is an abomination, the extent of which exists nowhere else. It’s also necessary to realize that the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has no capacity (and it would appear, no inclination) to do anything about the carnage in the eastern region.
The United Nations has a principle called the Responsibility to Protect, a principle that calls for intervention by the outside world when a sovereign state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizenry. “R2P” absolutely and unequivocally applies to the destruction of the human rights of women in the Congo. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the Security Council has not the slightest intention of invoking “R2P”.
I would therefore say to UN Emergency Coordinator John Holmes that along with visits to the eastern Congo to verify what others have known for more than five years, he and the Secretary-General have to face a truly unpleasant reality: neither the United Nations nor the international community has the faintest idea what to do about the catastrophe for women in the Congo.
Where the Congo is concerned, all the Security Council is really concerned about (as evidenced in their most recent discussions) is questions of troop numbers, arms embargoes and sanctions. Rape is not on the agenda.
We could construct all kinds of typical UN responses to the ongoing tragedy: give eastern Congo a profile equivalent to Darfur, with a similar involvement of the Secretary-General; have the Secretary-General meet with the International Criminal Court to invoke the use of rape as a crime against humanity in the issuance of scores of indictments; ask the Security Council to address the issue of the culture of impunity; argue for a doubling or trebling of the MONUC troop complement; establish a host of health facilities with trained professionals to treat the victims of sexual violence. The list of predictable recommendations could go on ad infinitum.
But it's all short of the mark. It's all achingly slow, and when action is finally taken, it's inadequate. And it all misses the point: there is no precedent for the insensate brutality of the war on women in the Congo. The world has never dealt with such a twisted and blistering phenomenon. That is not to say we weren’t given ample clues of a trend that was headed for this crescendo. From Bosnia-Herzegovina to Rwanda to Sierra Leone and Liberia, modern-day conflicts have employed the terrorist tactic of rape as a weapon of war. And the male instinct to unleash feelings of rage and frustration on women is hardly unfamiliar. But the capacity for brutality by so many perpetrators – and on the flip side, the capacity for indifference by so many witnesses – is the ugly apex of a trend gone unchecked. The international community has applied lacklustre remedies to similar, if less extreme crises of sexual violence in the past, and with little effect. It falls somewhere between inhumane and criminally negligent to pretend that remedies that have proven inadequate under less extreme conditions will somehow solve the problem in the Congo. The old nostrums won't work. There must be dramatic departures.
Just look at MONUC. It has the highest numbers of any UN Peacekeeping operation: as of the beginning of this year there were 16,475 in the military contingent, 719 military observers, 304 military police, 2,114 civilian personnel, and with astonishing impotence, they’ve simply watched the war on women accelerate. More, it’s under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter operation: MONUC has the right and obligation to employ arms to protect civilians from physical assault … but do they act on that obligation where sexual assault is concerned? For civilian women who need protection against rape, Chapter Seven is a travesty. And it costs over a billion dollars a year.
The natural inclination, then, simply to increase troop numbers, is less than an answer. It’s especially not the answer when the training has been insufficient to prevent those self-same troops from engaging in intermittent violence against women themselves.
Nor have the United Nations agencies been able to do more than ameliorate, ever so slightly, the victimization of the women of the eastern Congo. Yes, from time to time, as in the case of UNICEF, they draw attention to the most flagrant and chaotic aggression. But the momentary profile of gender-based insanity doesn’t begin to have permanence.
Let me readily admit that I don’t know what will work. But as the former Envoy on AIDS in Africa, I know that crises driven by the oppression of women do not simply fade away if they’re ignored. They explode. In the 1980s and well into the 90s, we allowed the whirlwind of AIDS transmission to tear through the African continent, aided and abetted by aggressive, often violent male behaviour that has never been targeted for elimination in a systematic, uncompromising way. The AIDS virus thrives on sexual violence. Sexual violence thrives on armed conflict. As if either one was not devastating enough, these two malevolent realities have joined forces to declare war on the women of the Congo. If we don’t do something, and soon, HIV/AIDS and violence against women are destined to win. And having chosen to do nothing, the world community will be to blame.
It seems to me that the Secretary-General should be instructed to draw together from every part of the world women who are expert in sexual violence, who have given their lives to the study of rape, its causes and consequences, women who can collectively draw up a series of responses to the Congo. Men in high places have applied a spectacular lack of energy, interest, insight and ideas to ending Congo’s war on women; it’s time that they turned this crisis over to women. You can be absolutely certain that the approach of the President of Liberia, or the President of Chile would be vastly different from anything presently lurking in the minds of men.
The expertise of women offers the world its best shot at a solution to the war on women. The United Nations secretariat should be humble enough to seek the answers from outside. The inside has failed. The Congo is strewn with the mutilated bodies of that failure.
Allow me to say that what has come to pass in the eastern Congo is an inevitable result of marginalizing 52% of the world’s population, and permitting multilateralism to turn its back on gender equality. AIDS and rampant sexual violence are just two of the resulting pandemics; one doesn’t need a crystal ball to predict that we’re in store for more. That’s why we so desperately need an international agency for women. There must be a voice, tenacious, indefatigable, unrelenting, well-financed, that never lets the world forget the indignities and human rights abuses visited on women. No one can say with certainty that had a women’s agency been around in 2001, the bleeding landscape of the Congo would have been different in 2007. But at least there would have been a fighting chance. At least the voices raised on the outside would have had allies on the inside. And at least the voices on the inside, like those of Jan Egeland, would not have been shouting into the void.
With a UN women’s agency of strength, one headed by an Under-Secretary General, with a billion dollars a year, and gender experts on the ground -- preventing crises that haven’t yet happened, and ending the ones that have -- the women of the Congo might have some glimmers of hope.
Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa and current Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, is on a visit to Kenya, South Africa and Lesotho in his role as Chair of the Board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation.
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