Rape of the Congo - the war against women and children
Last week I made a trip down to London to interview the author, playwrite and columnist for the Independent, Johann Hari, about his time out in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Johann wrote a feature on the war for the Indy a few weeks ago and, with this being an issue I have cared about for some time, and with Johann being one of my favourite columnists, I thought it would be a great opportunity to go down to London and talk to him about his experiences.
I have to say this is probably the most difficult piece I have ever written. Hopefully it will become clear why when you read it.
So, here you are (excuse the lack of photos)...
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Rape of the Congo - the war against women and children
It is the most deadly war since Adolf Hitler’s army marched across Europe. Encompassing nine nations, dozens of militias and killing over four million people, yet weeks will go by and it gets barely even a mention. For many years now the whole Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo has effectively been outside central government control. The Congo is a country the size of Western Europe, and since 1994, hundreds of thousands of children have been orphaned. Every day, women are kidnapped by militias, and rape has become a weapon of war.
Last month, Independent columnist Johann Hari went to travel out in the Congo, to investigate why the war continues to proliferate, and listen to the stories of the women and children who are most badly affected by the continuing violence; “I went to a rape clinic, it is the only rape clinic in Eastern Congo, called the Panzi hospital, where there were dozens of women who had been gang raped and shot in the vagina.” This is an increasingly common occurrence now in the Congo. Rather than fighting each other, the militias are trying to destroy the other side’s moral by fighting their women; “Sexual violence is absolutely endemic as a tool of war in the Congo.”
During his time in the Congo, Johann visited a hospital run by a man called Denis Mukwege, whom he described as “the Oskar Schindler” of the Congolese mass rapes. For years Dr. Mukwege was not allowed to treat the women, so he ran his hospital in secret; “he had a three year old girl brought in where, as he put it, ‘everything had been shot away’, and the father almost immediately committed suicide because he couldn’t cope with it. He had a very old woman brought in who had been gang raped in front of her sons in law.” The relationship between a mother and her son-in-law is a very holy one in the Congo; “she just said ‘don’t feed me, I want to die, I can never go back.” The women that make it to Dr. Mukwege’s hospital are, of course, the luck one’s. Most women are just left to die.
While the death toll in itself is horrifying enough. Only by looking at the individual tragedies can we begin to understand the horrors of this war; “The UN vehicle I was travelling in had a flat tyre and we had to stop. By the side of the road there was this woman called Mary Djembe, carrying this huge load.” In Congo, because no one really has cars and there are very few horses, women are basically used as packhorses. They are made to carry these absolutely huge loads for as little as 30 cents a day. “The load she was carrying weighed 200lb, I tried to carry it on my back and I couldn’t have walked to the other side of the road. I asked her how far she was going, and she said ’30 miles.”
During the journey, Mary recounted her story to Johann; “She was forced out when the Intrahamwe, one of the militias, started picking off women from her village. A very good friend of hers was taken. She came back a year later, she had been kept by the militia and repeatedly gang raped. When she came back her family wouldn’t look at her, and the woman just went completely mad and started tearing out her hair, before running back out into the forest. Mary and her husband moved to one of the towns which are slightly safer.”
So why have things ended up like this? Why does this war that ‘officially’ ended in 2003 continue to destroy so many lives? The answer is probably sitting right in front of you, in your computer, in your iPod and in your mobile phone. All of these electronic devices contain a metal called coltan, 80% of known supplies of which lie under the Congo.
The official story of how the war started centres around the tiny mountain state of Rwanda. After the 1994 genocide, the Hutu Power people who perpetrated it fled across the border into the Congo. What it is said then happened is the Rwandan forces went across the border to capture them. Other countries then invaded as a countervailing force and you had Africa’s first world war.
The UN panel of experts set up to look into the causes of the war discovered a more sinister story though. What was found was that Rwanda did not invade to go after the perpetrators of the genocide, but to seize the mineral resources of Congo and sell them on to us in the West. Due to the increasing popularity of mobile phones and playstations, the price of coltan boomed during the 1990’s. This made it much more attractive for Rwanda and the other international armies and militias to go in there and take it; “As Oona King puts it, kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living room.”
Johann went with Oona King, University of York graduate and former Labour party MP, to visit an orphanage just outside the Congolese capital of Kinshasa; “we were told this was one of the best orphanages in the Congo. When we arrived, the first room we went into, the children were just covered in shit, and flies and vomit. One child was lying on the floor just shaking. They said this was where the Aids babies go.
“There was one boy just rocking back and forward, and we asked ‘what is wrong with this kid?’ They said ‘he’s been like that since he arrived here.’ We asked what his name was and they said ‘he doesn’t have a name.”
It is not only Congo’s physical landscape that is in ruins, it is it’s psychological one too; “There has always been an idea of witchcraft in the Congo but it has always generally applied to older people, it is very new and is a product of the war to accuse children of being witches.
“In the orphanage we saw a child who they called ‘Fidel’, they didn’t know his name because he hadn’t spoken, who had his penis cut off by his parents because they thought he was a witch. I went to one of the evangelical churches promoting this idea of witchcraft in a place called Bukavu. I met a 14-year-old girl who was accused of being a witch. She said that her grandmother had came to her in her sleep, and forced her to eat an evil doughnut, and this evil doughnut had meant she had killed her baby sister. This girl had been made to believe she had really done these things, and that she had turned into a dog and a cat and gone out and killed people in the night.” Johann pauses for a while; “If Britain had 4 million people murdered, and the rest of us displaced from our homes, living in terror and gang raped, we would start to believe some pretty crazy things too.”
The UN has a force of 17,000 international peacekeepers in the Congo. If you consider the immense size of the country however, this really doesn’t work out as many. When you consider as well, that every country that has ever had UN peacekeepers deployed in it could fit inside Congo, and there would still be room for France; “This is by far the biggest peace keeping mission that the UN has ever tried. They do some good, but they simply don’t have the resources. They are not even able to bind the wound, never mind treat it.”
I have to say this is probably the most difficult piece I have ever written. Hopefully it will become clear why when you read it.
So, here you are (excuse the lack of photos)...
---------------------------------------------------------------
Rape of the Congo - the war against women and children
It is the most deadly war since Adolf Hitler’s army marched across Europe. Encompassing nine nations, dozens of militias and killing over four million people, yet weeks will go by and it gets barely even a mention. For many years now the whole Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo has effectively been outside central government control. The Congo is a country the size of Western Europe, and since 1994, hundreds of thousands of children have been orphaned. Every day, women are kidnapped by militias, and rape has become a weapon of war.
Last month, Independent columnist Johann Hari went to travel out in the Congo, to investigate why the war continues to proliferate, and listen to the stories of the women and children who are most badly affected by the continuing violence; “I went to a rape clinic, it is the only rape clinic in Eastern Congo, called the Panzi hospital, where there were dozens of women who had been gang raped and shot in the vagina.” This is an increasingly common occurrence now in the Congo. Rather than fighting each other, the militias are trying to destroy the other side’s moral by fighting their women; “Sexual violence is absolutely endemic as a tool of war in the Congo.”
During his time in the Congo, Johann visited a hospital run by a man called Denis Mukwege, whom he described as “the Oskar Schindler” of the Congolese mass rapes. For years Dr. Mukwege was not allowed to treat the women, so he ran his hospital in secret; “he had a three year old girl brought in where, as he put it, ‘everything had been shot away’, and the father almost immediately committed suicide because he couldn’t cope with it. He had a very old woman brought in who had been gang raped in front of her sons in law.” The relationship between a mother and her son-in-law is a very holy one in the Congo; “she just said ‘don’t feed me, I want to die, I can never go back.” The women that make it to Dr. Mukwege’s hospital are, of course, the luck one’s. Most women are just left to die.
While the death toll in itself is horrifying enough. Only by looking at the individual tragedies can we begin to understand the horrors of this war; “The UN vehicle I was travelling in had a flat tyre and we had to stop. By the side of the road there was this woman called Mary Djembe, carrying this huge load.” In Congo, because no one really has cars and there are very few horses, women are basically used as packhorses. They are made to carry these absolutely huge loads for as little as 30 cents a day. “The load she was carrying weighed 200lb, I tried to carry it on my back and I couldn’t have walked to the other side of the road. I asked her how far she was going, and she said ’30 miles.”
During the journey, Mary recounted her story to Johann; “She was forced out when the Intrahamwe, one of the militias, started picking off women from her village. A very good friend of hers was taken. She came back a year later, she had been kept by the militia and repeatedly gang raped. When she came back her family wouldn’t look at her, and the woman just went completely mad and started tearing out her hair, before running back out into the forest. Mary and her husband moved to one of the towns which are slightly safer.”
So why have things ended up like this? Why does this war that ‘officially’ ended in 2003 continue to destroy so many lives? The answer is probably sitting right in front of you, in your computer, in your iPod and in your mobile phone. All of these electronic devices contain a metal called coltan, 80% of known supplies of which lie under the Congo.
The official story of how the war started centres around the tiny mountain state of Rwanda. After the 1994 genocide, the Hutu Power people who perpetrated it fled across the border into the Congo. What it is said then happened is the Rwandan forces went across the border to capture them. Other countries then invaded as a countervailing force and you had Africa’s first world war.
The UN panel of experts set up to look into the causes of the war discovered a more sinister story though. What was found was that Rwanda did not invade to go after the perpetrators of the genocide, but to seize the mineral resources of Congo and sell them on to us in the West. Due to the increasing popularity of mobile phones and playstations, the price of coltan boomed during the 1990’s. This made it much more attractive for Rwanda and the other international armies and militias to go in there and take it; “As Oona King puts it, kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living room.”
Johann went with Oona King, University of York graduate and former Labour party MP, to visit an orphanage just outside the Congolese capital of Kinshasa; “we were told this was one of the best orphanages in the Congo. When we arrived, the first room we went into, the children were just covered in shit, and flies and vomit. One child was lying on the floor just shaking. They said this was where the Aids babies go.
“There was one boy just rocking back and forward, and we asked ‘what is wrong with this kid?’ They said ‘he’s been like that since he arrived here.’ We asked what his name was and they said ‘he doesn’t have a name.”
It is not only Congo’s physical landscape that is in ruins, it is it’s psychological one too; “There has always been an idea of witchcraft in the Congo but it has always generally applied to older people, it is very new and is a product of the war to accuse children of being witches.
“In the orphanage we saw a child who they called ‘Fidel’, they didn’t know his name because he hadn’t spoken, who had his penis cut off by his parents because they thought he was a witch. I went to one of the evangelical churches promoting this idea of witchcraft in a place called Bukavu. I met a 14-year-old girl who was accused of being a witch. She said that her grandmother had came to her in her sleep, and forced her to eat an evil doughnut, and this evil doughnut had meant she had killed her baby sister. This girl had been made to believe she had really done these things, and that she had turned into a dog and a cat and gone out and killed people in the night.” Johann pauses for a while; “If Britain had 4 million people murdered, and the rest of us displaced from our homes, living in terror and gang raped, we would start to believe some pretty crazy things too.”
The UN has a force of 17,000 international peacekeepers in the Congo. If you consider the immense size of the country however, this really doesn’t work out as many. When you consider as well, that every country that has ever had UN peacekeepers deployed in it could fit inside Congo, and there would still be room for France; “This is by far the biggest peace keeping mission that the UN has ever tried. They do some good, but they simply don’t have the resources. They are not even able to bind the wound, never mind treat it.”
posted by Adam Sloan at 6:11 PM
2 Comments:
Thank you for drawing my attention to this terrible situation how can everyone just sit back and do nothing!!
Hi Adam, It's Pete Austin. Very powerful piece, VERY well written, well done.
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