Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] life in Congo

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

When I read stories like this, I am filled with a combination of rage 
and a sense of helplessness.  How can we help these people?


Mike Miller wrote:
> Following up on that last article about the World Bank analysis of the 
> wealth of nations, here is some news from one of the world's poorest 
> nations, one where rule of law is entirely absent in some regions: 
> Congo. The result of this social breakdown is horrifying.  You can see a 
> slide show and video at the URL below.  --Mike
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/world/africa/07congo.html
>
> N.Y. Times
> October 7, 2007
>
> Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War
>
> By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
>
> BUKAVU, Congo -- 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."
>
> Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of 
> violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically 
> attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United 
> Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu 
> Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number 
> across the country.
>
> "The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world," said John 
> Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian 
> affairs. "The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of 
> impunity -- it's appalling."
>
> The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over. Last year, this 
> country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 
> million and was intended to end Congo's various wars and rebellions and 
> its tradition of epically bad government.
>
> But the elections have not unified the country or significantly 
> strengthened the Congolese government's hand to deal with renegade 
> forces, many of them from outside the country. The justice system and 
> the military still barely function, and United Nations officials say 
> Congolese government troops are among the worst offenders when it comes 
> to rape. Large swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain 
> authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed 
> groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding 
> villages and abducting women for ransom.
>
> According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the 
> Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the 
> forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are 
> notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up 
> anybody who gets in their way.
>
> United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the 
> Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, 
> but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in 
> freelance cruelty.
>
> Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and 
> downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas 
> raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time 
> she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her 
> delicate neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to 
> gang-rape her, she said.
>
> "I'm weak, I'm angry, and I don't know how to restart my life," she said 
> from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors 
> freed her.
>
> She is also pregnant.
>
> While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear 
> that Congo's problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.
>
> "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.
>
> In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young 
> men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no 
> shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; 
> homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil 
> before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally 
> from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 
> years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted 
> from Congo's exploited soil.
>
> The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest United Nations 
> peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.
>
> Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest patient was 75, his 
> youngest 3.
>
> "Some of these girls whose insides have been destroyed are so young that 
> they don't understand what happened to them," Dr. Mukwege said. "They 
> ask me if they will ever be able to have children, and it's hard to look 
> into their eyes."
>
> No one -- doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers -- can 
> explain exactly why this is happening.
>
> "That is the question," said André Bourque, a Canadian consultant who 
> works with aid groups in eastern Congo. "Sexual violence in Congo 
> reaches a level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse than in 
> Rwanda during the genocide."
>
> Impunity may be a contributing factor, Mr. Bourque added, saying that 
> very few of the culprits are punished.
>
> Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and 
> insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something 
> ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. "If that 
> were the case, this would have showed up long ago," said Wilhelmine 
> Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.
>
> Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the 
> mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped 
> into Congo's forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate 
> Hutus during Rwanda's genocide 13 years ago.
>
> Mr. Holmes said that while government troops might have raped thousands 
> of women, the most vicious attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias.
>
> "These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been 
> psychologically destroyed by it," he said.
>
> Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon "reversed values" and said it could 
> develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict 
> for many years, like eastern Congo.
>
> This place, one of the greenest, hilliest and most scenic slices of 
> central Africa, continues to reverberate from the aftershocks of the 
> genocide next door. Take the recent fighting near Bukavu between the 
> Congolese Army and Laurent Nkunda, a dissident general who commands a 
> formidable rebel force. Mr. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who has accused 
> the Congolese Army of supporting Hutu militias, which the army denies. 
> Mr. Nkunda says his rebel force is simply protecting Tutsi civilians 
> from being victimized again.
>
> But his men may be no better.
>
> Willermine Mulihano said she was raped twice -- first by Hutu militiamen 
> two years ago and then by Nkunda soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her 
> legs apart, while three others took turns violating her.
>
> "When I think about what happened," she said, "I feel anxious and 
> brokenhearted."
>
> She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the first rape, 
> saying she was diseased.
>
> In some cases, the attacks are on civilians already caught in the 
> cross-fire between warring groups. In one village near Bukavu where 27 
> women were raped and 18 civilians killed in May, the attackers left 
> behind a note in broken Swahili telling the villagers that the violence 
> would go on as long as government troops were in the area.
>
> The United Nations peacekeepers here seem to be stepping up efforts to 
> protect women.
>
> Recently, they initiated what they call "night flashes," in which three 
> truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights 
> on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the 
> peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers 
> are curled up on the ground around them.
>
> But the problem seems bigger than the resources currently devoted to it.
>
> Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is being built 
> specifically for rape victims, the hospital sends women back to their 
> villages before they have fully recovered because it needs space for the 
> never-ending stream of new arrivals.
>
> Dr. Mukwege, 52, said he remembered the days when Bukavu was known for 
> its stunning lake views and nearby national parks, like Kahuzi-Biega.
>
> "There used to be a lot of gorillas in there," he said. "But now they've 
> been replaced by much more savage beasts."
>
>
> Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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