Congo's tragedy - the war the world forgot
by Johann Hari
In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives. Journalist Johann Hari reports from a hospital coping with the sexual violence inflicted on women in the Democratic Republic of Congo
I am standing in a makeshift ward in the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, the only hospital
that is trying to deal with the bushfire of sexual violence in eastern Congo.
Most have wrapped themselves deep in their blankets so I can only see their eyes
staring blankly at me. Dr Denis Mukwege is speaking. 'Around 10 per cent of the
gang-rape victims have had this happen to them,' he says softly, his big hands
tucked into his white coat. 'We are trying to reconstruct their vaginas, their
anuses, their intestines. It is a long process.'
We walk out into the courtyard. 'We started with a catastrophe we just couldn't understand,' he says quietly. One day early in the war, a woman was carried here on her grandmother's back after an eight-hour trek. 'I had never seen anything like it. She had been gang-raped and then her legs had been shot to pieces. I operated on her on a table with no equipment, no medicine.'
| 'Our minds just couldn't take in what these women had suffered' |
She was only the first. 'We suddenly had so many women coming in with post-rape lesions and injuries I could never have imagined. Our minds just couldn't take in what these women had suffered.' The competing armies had discovered that rape was an efficient weapon in this war. Even in this small province, South Kivu, the UN estimates that 45,000 women were raped last year alone. 'It destroys the morale of the men to rape their women. Crippling their women cripples their society,' he explains, shaking his head gently. There were so many militias around that Dr Mukwege had to keep his treatments secret: the women were terrified of being kidnapped again and killed.
As we walk down to watch 200 rape victims being taught to sew under a large, dark bridge, he tells me what they can expect now. 'When the rapes begin, the husbands and fathers often just scarper and never come back. The women never hear anything from them again. Other times, the men blame the women and shun them.'
He introduces me to Aileen, who is 18 but looks much younger. She holds her hands tightly in her lap. Her story is stark, the details sparse. Her village was raided by a militia on 10 October, and 'they beheaded people in the central square'. Her voice is high-pitched; she is almost squeaking. She was seized and taken back out into the forest by the militia where they kept her for six months. 'I was raped every night. The first night my body really ached and hurt because I was a virgin,' she says. She would be passed on from one man to the next. It is only as she speaks that I notice the large protruding bump sagging into her lap. The baby is going to be born next month. 'What', she asks me with wide eyes as we leave, 'do you think I should do? Where can I go?'
The rape of Aileen and the thousands of women who stagger into the Panzi hospital
are merely part of a larger rape - the rape of Congo. This war has been dismissed
as an internal African implosion. In reality it is a battle for coltan, diamonds,
cassiterite and gold - metals that make our technological society vibrate and
ring and bling. The long Congolese war is one that we in the West have fostered,
fuelled and funded for the sake of the electronic gadgetry on which we depend.
Amnesty Magazine, July/August 2006 issue. Johann Hari writes for The Independent.
