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.
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.
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 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.