For tens of thousands of people who live in daily fear of sexual violence, the UN Security Council’s emergency session to consider ways of preventing mass rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) must look like the diplomatic equivalent of offering band aids to a bleeding horse. The Security Council meeting follows reports that between 150 and 200 women and children were raped by Rwandan rebel groups, over a period of four days, in and around the town of Luvungi in North Kiva, less than 20 miles from a UN peacekeeping base. The rebels looted and raped with complete impunity and the UN reportedly did not learn of the rapes for more than a week.
Whatever plan the Security Council eventually formulates will have to face several difficult truths. After years of horrific sexual violence, rape is now a commonplace feature of the ongoing hostilities in the DRC. In 2009, more than 9,000 women, men and children were raped, many with a brutality that makes reports of their suffering barely credible to Western ears.
Testifying before the US Senate last year, the women’s activist Chouchou Namegabe recounted the case of a 40-year old woman she had met in a hospital in Panzi. After her husband had been killed, several men took the woman into the forest and raped her repeatedly in front of her five children. Over a period of days, her attackers killed the children and forced her to eat their flesh. Namegabe told the Senate Committee: “The women ask why? Why such atrocities? Why do they fight their war on women’s bodies?” Then she answered her own question: “It is because there is a plan to put fear into the community through the woman, because she is the heart of the community. When she is pushed down, the whole community follows.”
The military use of rape to terrorize civilians is hardly unique to Africa. In the Second World War, up to 300,000 civilians were raped and tortured by Japanese soldiers in Nanking. The Japanese military also subjected a further 200,000 Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian and Korean women to systematic rape as “comfort women.” During the wars that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Serbian forces used rape camps to humiliate as many as 20,000 Muslim and Croatian women. In Argentina’s Dirty War, the School of Naval Mechanics (ESMA) was used for the torture and rape of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women. (As many as 500 children who resulted from these rapes were then given to military families, to be raised as their own.)
In each of these cases, there is ample evidence that the prolonged abuse was driven by the recurring, nihilistic idea that the humiliation and destruction of women might help achieve military and political objectives. What makes the situation in the Congo somewhat unusual is that this violence seems to have infected the wider society.
In Now, the World is Without Me, a report compiled for the British charity Oxfam, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative refers, chillingly, to “a civilian adoption of rape.” It notes that between 2004 and 2008 the number of civilian rapes increased 17-fold, and more than half were committed by armed men in the victims’ homes, often in the presence of family members. “These findings,” the report warns, “imply a normalization of rape among the civilian population, suggesting the erosion of all constructive social mechanisms that ought to protect civilians from sexual violence.”
An inspiring example of how these social mechanisms might be restored can be found in a compelling documentary on a peace movement in Liberia. The 2008 film Pray the Devil Back to Hell follows the success of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace in forcing the government and rebel forces – across religious, ethnic and linguistic divides – to reach a deal which ended a brutal and costly civil war. With astonishing moral courage the movement forced the politicians to concede that the war’s casual assault on Liberian society – most notably through the use of child soldiers to rape and pillage civilian populations – placed it in danger of irrecoverable harm. With non-violent protests, press releases and strategic interventions at the peace talks, the WLMAP not only helped to end the war but set the stage for the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the continent’s first female head of state. The film is a timely reminder that Africa’s “basket cases” can recover from their apparent hopelessness, once reformers are given the right opportunities.
Without a sustained commitment from the international community, outrages in the DRC will continue well into the foreseeable future. The country is too large, too populous, too full of mineral wealth for the militias who have preyed on civilians for so long to change their ways. In fact the conflict may be poised to enter a bloody new phase. President Kabila has asked the UN to provide a timetable for the withdrawal of its peacekeepers and Rwanda’s President Kagame – recently re-elected by a suspiciously high electoral margin – is feared to be considering further action against rebels who threaten his borders from within the DRC. Should Kabila and Kagame get their wishes the violence will escalate, but the UN’s repeated failures to establish a secure peace lends credibility to their claims that a military solution may still be needed to end the series of wars which have consumed almost 4 million lives. In other words, the mass rape of civilians will remain a simple fact of life in the Congo, unless the rest of the world is willing to commit the resources – military, political and economic – needed to end more than a decade of multinational warfare. Without the international community’s determined persistence in the face of discouraging odds, the horrors of Luvungi will recur elsewhere in the DRC for many years to come.
