Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynaecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.
Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked, with bayonets and woodbutchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.
“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicentre of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”
Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.
Large swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.
According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny track suits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.
UN officials said that the Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialise in freelance cruelty.
Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.
While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say that they fear that Congo’s problem has metastasised into a wider social phenomenon.
“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu.
Malteser International, a European aid organisation that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year.
In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here there is no shortage of them. The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.
No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why this is happening.
Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society.
UN peacekeepers here seem to be stepping up efforts to protect women. Recently, they initiated what they call “night flashes”, in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.
But the problem seems bigger than the resources currently devoted to it.
IHT
