This is the first time a mastermind of mass rape has been held legally responsible in DRC. But the story doesn’t end here. There are still a few major issues to watch.
Today a historic conviction came down in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was the first time an official or commander has been convicted of masterminding rape in the country.
It is 9 a.m. on November 9, and hundreds—maybe 1,000—people have gathered to watch something many believed would never happen: the trial of a group of men who allegedly gang-raped approximately 50 little girls, aged 18 months to 11 years, in a village called Kavumu. Justice has been four years in the making.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is going to Africa. South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia, specifically. She says in an October 22 CNN op-ed that President Trump is sending her “to get a first-hand picture of what can be done.”
On computer screens thousands of miles away from one another, some of the world’s leading feminist figures joined in solidarity with women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the country’s first-ever women’s summit on September 14.
Six years after one of the worst single incidents of mass rape ever recorded in the 21st century, no perpetrator of the Walikale mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has ever been brought to trial in either a domestic or international forum. The attacks were condemned at the time by the United Nations Security Council, which urged swift prosecution. The hundreds of victims have never received any acknowledgment or reparation from the Congolese state.
When the Democratic Republic of Congo was dubbed the “rape capital of the world” in 2010 by Margot Wallström, the former UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, understandably the government of DRC was not happy. Besides that, putting one country above all others when it comes to violence against women is a debatable move: So many places have horrifying records of rape and impunity for such cases. But Wallström had good reason for aiming her words at what is unambiguously a truly terrible place for women.
There’s a darkish room, maybe 12 feet by 13 feet, tucked into the back area of the ground floor of a school called Lycée Wima. Seated along walls of peeling paint are more than a dozen women sewing patterned bags, shoes, dresses, and dolls on elegant Singer sewing machines from the time between the last world wars. The work is exacting.
Colonel Magistrate Freddy Mukendi is an imposing man who speaks from behind darkly shaded eyeglasses. He takes up the full space of a lounge chair, giving off a breezy, if formal, comfort in his own skin. Considering his high-level position in the DRC, this may not be entirely unexpected.
When Congolese President Joseph Kabila tapped 49-year-old Jeanine Mabunda Lioko, a finance executive and a member of the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to be his special representative on sexualized violence in July 2014, UN representatives hailed the appointment as a “new dawn” in the fight to end rape and child recruitment in the country’s 20-year conflict.
Twenty-five years of breathing in dust has led Mireille Mbale to drink milk when she can afford it; it is what she believes will guard her against lung disease. She makes less than $5 a day. Years of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s brash sun have dried her exposed skin.
A woman sits, microphone in hand, behind a billowing, black curtain—further obscured by a black veil that hides her face, her body, and even her hands—as she finds the courage to recount her rape by government soldiers in Minova, Democratic Republic of Congo.
The war in Congo is like a snake. Sometimes it slithers by and you see it and feel terror; other times, it hides in the trees, waiting. Everywhere I traveled in the country with the Nobel Women’s Initiative in February, I felt that ever-present fear—and exhaustion from so many years of being either attacked or on the lookout.
There were so very many stories. Stories of women physically torn apart, leaving stains of urine on chairs from fistula they suffered from violent rape. Stories about sexual enslavement that left teenage girls hysterically crying and unable to finish speaking. Stories of erasure—of women who had been left by their husbands and shunned by their own children because men had raped them.
I’ve been reading King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, which tells the utterly brutal colonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Early on in the book, the author laments the lack of African voices on record that tell the history of the country. Instead it is a history told by the conquerors, as all history generally is. There is no shortage of evidence, however, that the Europeans who colonized the area inflicted terrors on black men and women that are stomach-sickening.
It’s easy to associate rape with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a region torn by conflict since 1996. Dubbed the “rape capital of the world,” the country sees four women raped every five minutes, according to a 2011 study published by the American Journal of Public Health.
Sometimes I read something that makes the movement of the world, the very air in the room, freeze to a stop. That’s what happened recently when I read a letter written by an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Neema Namadamu. I read it once, then I read it again. Instead of describing why it had such a profound effect on me, I’m pasting it in full below.
In August 2010, reports began trickling out of Democratic Republic of Congo about another tragic episode of mass sexualized violence perpetrated by rebel troops over four days in the eastern town of Luvungi. But in a recent issue of Foreign Policy, a debate sprang up about the way outsiders have portrayed the attack. The controversy highlights the need for a more candid discussion about Congo.
There is little violence on earth more merciless than what is happening to women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “When you talk about rape in New York or Paris, everyone can always say, ‘Yes, we have rape here too,’” Dr. Denis Mukwege, the founder of Congo’s Panzi Hospital, told Jeb Sharp, a producer at PRI’s “The World,” in 2008.
We of the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict stand with the women and men who are protesting today by organizing a ville morte in Bukavu. Last week, we were shocked to learn about the apparent assassination attempt on world-renowned surgeon, anti-rape activist, and our esteemed colleague: Dr. Denis Mukwege.
It’s easy to get bogged down in statistics of women who experience sexualized violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The numbers are staggering: A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in May 2011 showed that 12 percent of women in Congo had been raped at least once in their lifetime.
It's been less than a year since photojournalist Lynsey Addario returned from Libya, where soldiers loyal to Muammar Gaddafi sexually abused her during six days in captivity. I interviewed Addario just after she returned, and her honesty and stated intention of “shaming the Libyans” for what had been done to her evinced a remarkable personal strength.
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