Women of the Congo by Martine Perret for the UN
More than five million people have died in the last 10 years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Though rebel groups negotiated a fragile power-sharing government, the Eastern Congo is still rife with violence. The roots of the civil war were ethnic and economic, but women have taken a central role in the conflict as guerilla groups escalate their use of rape as a tool of warfare.
“The war claimed an estimated three million lives, either as a direct result of fighting or because of disease and malnutrition. It has been called possibly the worst emergency to unfold in Africa in recent decades.
The war had an economic as well as a political side. Fighting was fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth, with all sides taking advantage of the anarchy to plunder natural resources.” BBC News, October, 2009.
Many Americans are unwitting consumers of these natural resources. Gold, diamonds, laptop and cell phone parts, and copper wire commonly used in homes are abundant in the Congo and are their primary exports. The battle over their control has been the source of the DCR’s violent conflict, one we support by continuing to buy them.
Congolese women at a refugee camp by Spyros Demetriou
Communities are attacked and looted and forced to leave their homes. As a result there is an enormous population of refugees, many of whom are women who have been brutally wounded by rape. The rapes often happen in villages far from cities and proper medical care. Village men are unarmed and cannot protect the women who are seized, savagely raped, or sometimes kidnapped for months at a time and kept as sexual slaves and tortured by militia men. In many instances, the woman’s husband and children, and other villagers are made to watch the rape, so that her ‘shame’ is compounded by this act of witnessing. Due to the lack of education in villages about HIV and AIDS, a woman who has been raped is often isolated for fear of contagion. There are also deep-seated social codes and taboos about a woman’s body being ‘used’ sexually by other men. This in combination with the men’s shame, their helplessness to stop the rape, means that the women are often left by their partners.
The total devastation and terror that results from such brutality is felt by the women who experience it, and by the community as a whole. These women sometimes have their sexual organs cut, burned or mutilated, or even shot at. Young girls are shot in the vagina so that they may never feel pleasure again. Some women are raped so violently that they are become unable to hold in their bodily fluids. It is often said that rape is not about sex, and is solely an act of violence. But rape uses the mechanics of sex to inflict pain. Witnessing a woman’s body, and especially her generative organs, which are life-giving and sacred, being so abused is a profoundly destructive act for an entire community. And these soldiers know it. It is reported that roughly 90% of women in the Congo have experienced rape. Toddlers as young as 3 and elderly women as old as 75. This means that a vast segment of the population – men and women – have been raped or have witnessed rape. Rape has become naturalized in the Congo, as another “weapon of war.”
– by Jacqueline Blair Holt
What we can do to stop it:
Check out the Women for Women International website. You can sponsor and correspond with another woman!
To raise awareness about products from the Congo: Raise Hope For Congo
This is a follow-up article for a previous post on women in the Congo.
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