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<TD width="17%"><B><FONT face="AmerType Md BT" color=#000080
size=2>Topic:</FONT></B></TD>
<TD width="83%"><B><FONT face="AmerType Md BT" size=2>Congo: A Hell on
Earth for Women.<BR>War, ethnic conflict, and the greed of neighboring
countries have turned the eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo
into an utterly lawless place. And as if massacres and systematic
plundering by armed bands weren't bad enough, the horror of rape is
everywhere, too.</FONT></B></TD></TR>
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<TD width="17%"><B><FONT face="AmerType Md BT" color=#000080
size=2>Author:</FONT></B></TD>
<TD width="83%"><FONT face="AmerType Md BT"><FONT size=2><B>World Press
Review</B><B> (</B><B>2003-10-02</B><B> at
</B><B>22:45</B><B>)</B></FONT></FONT></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><BR><B><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=5>Congo: A Hell on Earth for
Women</FONT></B><BR><B><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#666666
size=2><BR>René Lefort, </FONT></B><A
href="http://www.worldpress.org/link.cfm?http://www.nouvelobs.com/"
target=_blank><B><I><U><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=2>Le Nouvel
Observateur</FONT></U></I></B></A><B><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#666666
size=2> (liberal weekly), Paris, France, Sept. 11-Sept. 18, 2003.
</FONT></B></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><I><FONT face=Verdana>War, ethnic conflict, and the greed of neighboring
countries have turned the eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo into an
utterly lawless place. And as if massacres and systematic plundering by armed
bands weren't bad enough, the horror of rape is everywhere, too.</FONT></I><FONT
face=Verdana><BR><BR>"She came in last evening. Five armed men had raped her the
night before, a few kilometers from here," explains Mathilde Muhindo, director
of a social assistance agency of the Roman Catholic diocese of Bukavu, on the
eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. "This morning, she was still
crying. I cried with her," says Muhindo, in whose eyes traces of tears are
visible. Through a window outside her office, you see the profile of a woman,
her shoulders slumped, her face buried in her hands, sitting crumpled on the
edge of a bed. Looking away from the building, the eye meets an infinitely
tranquil countryside. In the distance, the hills of Rwanda emerge from the mist,
which lends a deep gray hue to the mirror-smooth waters of Lake Kivu below.
<BR><BR>"It was during 2000 that we began to see women coming in with the worst
lesions I've ever seen," remembers Dr. Denis Mukwege, director of Panzi
hospital, a few kilometers from the center of Bukavu, which is the capital of
South Kivu province. "They would tell fanciful, fabricated stories to explain
away their injuries." <BR><BR>It all began in 1994. Rwanda's Patriotic Front,
dominated by ethnic Tutsis, seized power in that country and halted the
genocidal attacks against the Tutsi community planned and perpetrated by the
Hutus, in which an estimated 800,000 people died. Perpetrators of the genocide
fled to neighboring Congo, herding along with them 1.5 million Hutu refugees
whom they then forcibly enrolled in a struggle against the new Rwandan regime.
To stamp out the insurgency, the Kigali regime launched its first war within
Congo's borders in 1996, during which 200,000 of these refugees—men, women, the
elderly, and children—were slaughtered as "genocide criminals" because they fled
the advance of the Rwandan army. With the collapse of Congo's economy and the
disappearance of any semblance of law and order, violence in eastern Congo
became commonplace. It's a culture characterized by acute spasms of violence,
fueled by ethnic hatred that is fed in turn by confrontations between radicals
from both of the Rwandan sides—all of which has spilled over into Congo. This
violence includes rape, carried out intentionally as a genocidal act.
<BR></DIV></FONT>
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<TD vAlign=center width=224 bgColor=#e2dec2><FONT face=Arial><FONT
size=2><B><FONT color=#986610>Martine's 'black book'</FONT></B><BR>She's a
tireless activist for democracy and development. Martine—not her real
name—remembers the exact date when she started keeping what she calls her
"black book." It was her birthday, a little more than a year ago. One
hundred thirty-six names are written down in the notebook, names that only
Martine knows, names of women raped outside their villages, far from
inquiring eyes or any possible help. They tell her their stories, and she
promises them absolute secrecy. <BR><BR>Martine has scratched out 58
names—the women she persuaded to seek treatment or assistance, often in
secret. For the 78 others, the dilemma continues. "Advice isn't enough,"
Martine sighs. "These women need treatment, too. But I have to respect
their wishes..." <BR><BR>More openly, she engages in mediation, trying to
persuade the husbands of rape victims not to send their wives away. "And
that's why I need a motorcycle," Martine blurts out with a small,
embarrassed laugh, as if to apologize for asking for
help.</FONT></FONT></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Verdana>Later, security considerations were overcome by greed,
the primary cause of the so-called "second war," which began in 1998. A number
of "elite networks," as defined by a hard-hitting U.N. report, comprising
military commanders, political leaders, and unscrupulous entrepreneurs in
Kigali, Kampala, and beyond, backed up by international mafias, plundered the
resources of eastern Congo (coltan ore, diamonds, gold, hardwoods) and turned
the region's economy to their personal profit. To accomplish their aims, they
had to resort continuously to force, but without betraying their true
objectives. In the "second war," Rwanda and Uganda masked their predatory
intentions by clandestinely maintaining regular or irregular troops, and above
all by fostering armed bands, organized along ethnic lines, forming and
reforming according to the current needs of their masters. The battles among
these bands have rarely led to major victories or defeats; the whole idea is to
maintain insecurity and justify the militarization that enables the massive
plundering. Amid all this, the local people have paid a terrible price.
<BR><BR>According to the U.N. report, which was published nearly a year ago, the
number of "excess deaths" in Congo directly attributable to the Rwandan and
Ugandan occupation can be estimated at between 3 million and 3.5 million. This
conflict has been the deadliest since World War II. In some areas of Congo,
investigations by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) have shown
that one in four children dies before the age of 5, and that one tenth of the
population dies annually. "These areas have the highest mortality rates in the
world." Finally, acts of sexual violence accompanying the carnage have been
without precedent in their frequency, their systematic nature, their brutality,
and the perversity of the way they're planned and staged. <BR><BR>According to a
U.N. department, "on average, some 40 women were raped every day between October
2002 and February 2003 in and around the town of Uvira," a town with a
population of between 200,000 and 300,000. A network of eight local
nongovernmental organizations, supported by the International Rescue Committee,
each month takes in nearly 1,000 women, girls, and boys who have been raped in
North and South Kivu, the latter province being these organizations' focal
point. Mathilde Muhindo's center alone admitted 145 such people in June.
Overwhelmed by such numbers, some of the centers will now admit women only in
groups of no more than 10. Various Catholic parochial bodies, which play a key
role in providing first aid to the victims, now take turns in furnishing
assistance; this is the most they can do. <BR><BR>And all this is just the tip
of the iceberg. Not every victim comes to the aid centers; the women who do are
the ones who know that help is available, and who are strong enough to walk
there—sometimes a journey of several days. Because the rapes are usually
accompanied by a systematic pillage of their homes, these women sometimes have
to borrow clothing from a neighbor. What's more, before they set out, they have
to scrape up enough money to bribe the soldiers at each roadblock, and for the
medical care they think they're going to have to pay for: Few of them know that
the aid centers charge practically nothing, an exception in a country where the
public health system is supposed to pay for itself. First and foremost, the
victims who do seek help are those who have dared break the taboo, the stigma
that attaches to any woman who's been raped. <BR><BR>Typically, an attack begins
a few hours after nightfall. After encircling a village, armed men divide into
groups that alternately plunder and rape. Around 2 or 3 a.m., they grab men from
the village to help carry the booty back to their base. The most ragtag of the
armed bands, the jungle-dwellers, the Mayi Mayi (originally local self-defense
militiamen) and armed Hutus—genocide criminals or survivors of the massacres in
the "first war"—will also kidnap women and girls from the target village. These
women serve as domestic and sexual slaves for weeks or months, and they are
sometimes traded from one armed band to another. <BR><BR>Since the beginning of
2002, the sexual assaults have followed patterns so common that they are
becoming commonplace. Several men gang-rape a woman, repeatedly. The husband is
tied up in the hut, the children are brought in; the whole family is obliged to
witness the humiliation of the wife and mother. </FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>