Friday, October 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Hebrews 13:1-3, NLT
1 Keep on loving each other as brothers and sisters.
2 Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it!
3 Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself.
REMEMBER ALSO THOSE BEING MISTREATED, AS IF YOU FELT THEIR PAIN IN YOUR OWN BODIES.
2 Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it!
3 Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself.
REMEMBER ALSO THOSE BEING MISTREATED, AS IF YOU FELT THEIR PAIN IN YOUR OWN BODIES.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
We are Running for Congo Women! Join us!!!
Here are the specifics:
Date
Saturday, October 03, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
Address
Lincoln Park, Grove #13 Between Belmont and Diversey Harbors
141 W Diversey Pkwy
Registration Closing Date
Thursday, October 01, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
COST
$20
Brief Description
This event is a 5K run or walk with a finish line celebration!
Additional Information
Event Description:
When we Run for Congo Women, we are sending a simple message:
Congolese lives matter.
The lives of Congolese women are significant.
The lives of Congolese children are precious.
They have waited far too long.
They are worth our effort.
We are running to help.
Join us!
Run for Congo Women benefits Women for Women International's program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 5.4 million people have died since 1998 in a conflict that has left Congo decimated. Women for Women International provides women survivors of war with rights awareness and job skills training, direct aid, small business development support and emotional support so they can move from victim to survivor to active citizen.
You can register on their website-
http://runforcongowomen.org/
If you can’t run or walk please make a donation in support of these women!
Date
Saturday, October 03, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
Address
Lincoln Park, Grove #13 Between Belmont and Diversey Harbors
141 W Diversey Pkwy
Registration Closing Date
Thursday, October 01, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
COST
$20
Brief Description
This event is a 5K run or walk with a finish line celebration!
Additional Information
Event Description:
When we Run for Congo Women, we are sending a simple message:
Congolese lives matter.
The lives of Congolese women are significant.
The lives of Congolese children are precious.
They have waited far too long.
They are worth our effort.
We are running to help.
Join us!
Run for Congo Women benefits Women for Women International's program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 5.4 million people have died since 1998 in a conflict that has left Congo decimated. Women for Women International provides women survivors of war with rights awareness and job skills training, direct aid, small business development support and emotional support so they can move from victim to survivor to active citizen.
You can register on their website-
http://runforcongowomen.org/
If you can’t run or walk please make a donation in support of these women!
Friday, August 21, 2009
Psalm 103:6
'The Lord executeth righteousness and judgement for all that are oppressed.'
Lord, we thank you in advance for saving the Congo!
Amen.
Lord, we thank you in advance for saving the Congo!
Amen.
'What I Saw in Goma'
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
In 11 days of travel across Africa, I saw humanity at its worst – and at its best. In Goma last week, I saw both.
The Mugunga Internally Displaced Persons Camp sits in a land of volcanoes and great lakes on the edge of Goma, a provincial capital in the eastern Congo. The camp is now home to 18,000 people seeking refuge from a cycle of violent conflict that has left 5.4 million dead since 1998. Chased from their homes and villages by armed rebels and informal militias, these men, women and children walked for miles with little food or water until they reached this relatively safe haven.
Now they live in tents, one next to the other, row after row, some clinging to life, others hanging on to whatever glimmer of hope remains in a region plagued by years of brutality. Many of these people have been robbed of their homes, possessions, families and, worst of all, their dignity.
Women and girls in particular have been victimized on an unimaginable scale, as sexual and gender-based violence has become a tactic of war and has reached epidemic proportions. Some 1,100 rapes are reported each month, with an average of 36 women and girls raped every day.
I visited a hospital run by the organization Heal Africa and met a woman who told me that she was eight months' pregnant when she was attacked. She was at home when a group of men broke in. They took her husband and two of their children and shot them in the front yard, before returning into the house to shoot her other two children. Then they beat and gang-raped her and left her for dead. But she wasn't dead. She fought for life and her neighbors managed to get her to the hospital – 85 kilometers away.
I came to Goma to send a clear message: The United States condemns these attacks and all those who commit them and abet them. They are crimes against humanity.
These acts don't just harm a single individual, or a single family, or village, or group. They shred the fabric that weaves us together as human beings. Such atrocities have no place in any society. This truly is humanity at its worst.
But there is reason to hope. We have seen survivors summon the courage to rebuild their lives and their communities. We have seen civic leaders and organizations come together to combat this appalling scourge. And we have seen health care workers sacrifice comfortable careers so they can treat the wounded.
In Goma, I met doctors and advocates who work every day to repair the broken bodies and spirits of women who have been raped, often by gangs, and often in such brutal fashion that they can no longer bear children, or walk or work. Caregivers like Lyn Lusi, who founded Heal Africa in Goma, and Dr. Denis Mukwege, who founded the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, represent humanity at its best.
The United States will stand with these brave people. This week I announced more than $17 million in new funding to prevent and respond to gender and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We will provide medical care, counseling, economic assistance and legal support. We will dedicate nearly $3 million to recruit and train police officers to protect women and girls and to investigate sexual violence. We will send technology experts to help women and front-line workers report abuse using photographs and video and share information on treatment and legal options. And we will deploy a team of civilian experts, medical personnel and military engineers to assess how we can further assist survivors of sexual violence.
While I was in the DRC, I had very frank discussions about sexual violence with President Kabila. I stressed that the perpetrators of these crimes, no matter who they are, must be prosecuted and punished. This is particularly important when they are in positions of authority, including members of the Congolese military, who have been allowed to commit these crimes with impunity.
Our commitment to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence did not begin with my visit to Goma, and it will not end with my departure.
We are redoubling our efforts to address the fundamental cause of this violence: the fighting that goes on and on in the eastern Congo. We will be taking additional steps at the United Nations and in concert with other nations to bring an end to this conflict.
There is an old Congolese proverb that says, "No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come." The day must come when the women of the eastern Congo can walk freely again, to tend their fields, play with their children and collect firewood and water without fear. They live in a region of unrivaled natural beauty and rich resources. They are strong and resilient. They could, if given the opportunity, drive economic and social progress that would make their country both peaceful and prosperous.
Working together, we will banish sexual violence into the dark past, where it belongs, and help the Congolese people seize the opportunities of a new day.
In 11 days of travel across Africa, I saw humanity at its worst – and at its best. In Goma last week, I saw both.
The Mugunga Internally Displaced Persons Camp sits in a land of volcanoes and great lakes on the edge of Goma, a provincial capital in the eastern Congo. The camp is now home to 18,000 people seeking refuge from a cycle of violent conflict that has left 5.4 million dead since 1998. Chased from their homes and villages by armed rebels and informal militias, these men, women and children walked for miles with little food or water until they reached this relatively safe haven.
Now they live in tents, one next to the other, row after row, some clinging to life, others hanging on to whatever glimmer of hope remains in a region plagued by years of brutality. Many of these people have been robbed of their homes, possessions, families and, worst of all, their dignity.
Women and girls in particular have been victimized on an unimaginable scale, as sexual and gender-based violence has become a tactic of war and has reached epidemic proportions. Some 1,100 rapes are reported each month, with an average of 36 women and girls raped every day.
I visited a hospital run by the organization Heal Africa and met a woman who told me that she was eight months' pregnant when she was attacked. She was at home when a group of men broke in. They took her husband and two of their children and shot them in the front yard, before returning into the house to shoot her other two children. Then they beat and gang-raped her and left her for dead. But she wasn't dead. She fought for life and her neighbors managed to get her to the hospital – 85 kilometers away.
I came to Goma to send a clear message: The United States condemns these attacks and all those who commit them and abet them. They are crimes against humanity.
These acts don't just harm a single individual, or a single family, or village, or group. They shred the fabric that weaves us together as human beings. Such atrocities have no place in any society. This truly is humanity at its worst.
But there is reason to hope. We have seen survivors summon the courage to rebuild their lives and their communities. We have seen civic leaders and organizations come together to combat this appalling scourge. And we have seen health care workers sacrifice comfortable careers so they can treat the wounded.
In Goma, I met doctors and advocates who work every day to repair the broken bodies and spirits of women who have been raped, often by gangs, and often in such brutal fashion that they can no longer bear children, or walk or work. Caregivers like Lyn Lusi, who founded Heal Africa in Goma, and Dr. Denis Mukwege, who founded the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, represent humanity at its best.
The United States will stand with these brave people. This week I announced more than $17 million in new funding to prevent and respond to gender and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We will provide medical care, counseling, economic assistance and legal support. We will dedicate nearly $3 million to recruit and train police officers to protect women and girls and to investigate sexual violence. We will send technology experts to help women and front-line workers report abuse using photographs and video and share information on treatment and legal options. And we will deploy a team of civilian experts, medical personnel and military engineers to assess how we can further assist survivors of sexual violence.
While I was in the DRC, I had very frank discussions about sexual violence with President Kabila. I stressed that the perpetrators of these crimes, no matter who they are, must be prosecuted and punished. This is particularly important when they are in positions of authority, including members of the Congolese military, who have been allowed to commit these crimes with impunity.
Our commitment to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence did not begin with my visit to Goma, and it will not end with my departure.
We are redoubling our efforts to address the fundamental cause of this violence: the fighting that goes on and on in the eastern Congo. We will be taking additional steps at the United Nations and in concert with other nations to bring an end to this conflict.
There is an old Congolese proverb that says, "No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come." The day must come when the women of the eastern Congo can walk freely again, to tend their fields, play with their children and collect firewood and water without fear. They live in a region of unrivaled natural beauty and rich resources. They are strong and resilient. They could, if given the opportunity, drive economic and social progress that would make their country both peaceful and prosperous.
Working together, we will banish sexual violence into the dark past, where it belongs, and help the Congolese people seize the opportunities of a new day.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Clinton demands end to sexual violence in Congo
By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer Matthew Lee, Associated Press Writer – 28 mins ago
GOMA, Congo – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton toured an African refugee camp Tuesday crowded with victims of violence and malnutrition, pledging $17 million in American aid to help stem the tide of rampant sexual abuse that has staggered war-ravaged eastern Congo.
Clinton's voice cracked with emotion as she described an epidemic of rapes that has convulsed the Congo over 10 years of internecine conflict. "We say to the world that those who attack civilian populations using systematic rape are guilty of crimes against humanity," she said.
Clinton toured Magunga Camp, a dust-choked warren of tents and tin-lined huts in eastern Congo that is home to 18,000 men, women and children. Most were uprooted from their villages by the on-again, off-again conflict between Democratic Republic of Congo troops and rebel forces that killed more than 5 million people since 1998.
"We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender-based violence committed by so many — that there must be arrests and prosecutions and punishment," she said during a press conference with Congolese Foreign Minister Alexis Thambwe Mwamba in the eastern city of Goma.
At least $10 million of the $17 million pledged by Clinton will be used to train doctors to treat victims of brutal sexual attacks. Some of the funds will also be aimed at preventing abuse.
She met with several residents of the camp, who told her that they are suffering from malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea. The residents told Clinton that women and young girls and boys are often victimized by rape when they leave the camp to go into a nearby forest to gather wood for cooking.
One camp official said a young boy had been raped on Monday.
"We really want to return home, that's why we are asking America to help stop the fighting," Chantale Mapendo, who lives in the camp, told Clinton.
"That's why I'm here," Clinton replied. "I want you to be able to go home."
Clinton appeared visibly moved when she was shown a four-year-old child, held in his mother's arms, who was suffering from extreme malnutrition. Belly distended, eyes hollow, the skeletal boy weighed less than 15 pounds.
"We're proud to help you," Clinton said.
Picking her way through a path littered with volcanic rock, Clinton said she "wanted to see for myself what was happening here."
Clinton flew to came to Goma, the regional capital of war-pocked of the eastern Congo, aboard a U.N. plane over the objections of some top aides who worried about her security and logistics for the visit. Clinton is the first U.S. secretary of state to visit the city, according to the State Department historian's office.
The United Nations has recorded at least 200,000 cases of sexual violence against women and girls in the region since conflict erupted in 1996, something Clinton deplored as "one of mankind's greatest atrocities" before she arrived.
The figures, Clinton told a group university students in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa on Monday, are "astonishing and horrible." She urged the youth of Congo to mount nationwide protests against such abuses and said she would push the government hard on the issue.
Clinton said Tuesday that the people of eastern Congo were still suffering from a "reign of violence" at the hands of rebel groups and the national army, which in January launched a U.N.-backed campaign to pacify the region.
Rights groups have called for a suspension of the operation, which has displaced some 800,000 people from their homes and left hundreds of civilians dead.
Clinton said the U.S. is "very concerned about the civilian casualties, both deaths and rapes and other injuries, from the military action."
But she also said the U.S. supported efforts to eliminate the threat from insurgents and said the U.S. wants the Congolese military professionalized to prevent abuses from the government.
Earlier in the day, Clinton delivered a strong message to Congolese President Joseph Kabila when they met in a tent at a compound in Goma, on the shore of Lake Kivu. Goma is the epicenter of an epidemic of gang rapes and other sexual crimes amid continuing fighting between the army and rebel groups.
After meeting with Kabila, Clinton said impunity for the perpetrators "runs counter to peace and stability for the Congolese people."
She said the U.S. will send a team of legal and financial and other technical experts to come up with specific recommendations for overcoming Congo's problems with corruption. She said Kabila had accepted that offer.
"We do support the efforts to end the militias and the violence they have visited so terribly on the people of the eastern Congo," Clinton said. But she added: "We believe that a disciplined, paid army is a more effective fighting force. We believe that more can be done to protect civilians while you are trying to kill and capture insurgents."
Although fighting has eased since a 2003 peace deal, the army and rebel groups, fighting over eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth, are still attacking villages, killing civilians and committing brutal atrocities.
Members of Kabila's armed forces are accused of taking part in the brutality, including gang rapes that have led to unwanted pregnancies, serious injuries and death to tens of thousands of women and girls.
Earlier this month, a leading human rights group demanded that Congo crack down on sexual violence often perpetrated by military generals and other top officers. It cited U.N. data showing that 7,703 cases of sexual violence by soldiers were reported last year.
Human Rights Watch said the Congolese authorities have failed to prevent the attacks and called on the U.N. Security Council to take tough steps, including travel bans, against individuals or governments that commit or condone sexual violence in Congo and elsewhere.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090811/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/af_clinton_africa
GOMA, Congo – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton toured an African refugee camp Tuesday crowded with victims of violence and malnutrition, pledging $17 million in American aid to help stem the tide of rampant sexual abuse that has staggered war-ravaged eastern Congo.
Clinton's voice cracked with emotion as she described an epidemic of rapes that has convulsed the Congo over 10 years of internecine conflict. "We say to the world that those who attack civilian populations using systematic rape are guilty of crimes against humanity," she said.
Clinton toured Magunga Camp, a dust-choked warren of tents and tin-lined huts in eastern Congo that is home to 18,000 men, women and children. Most were uprooted from their villages by the on-again, off-again conflict between Democratic Republic of Congo troops and rebel forces that killed more than 5 million people since 1998.
"We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender-based violence committed by so many — that there must be arrests and prosecutions and punishment," she said during a press conference with Congolese Foreign Minister Alexis Thambwe Mwamba in the eastern city of Goma.
At least $10 million of the $17 million pledged by Clinton will be used to train doctors to treat victims of brutal sexual attacks. Some of the funds will also be aimed at preventing abuse.
She met with several residents of the camp, who told her that they are suffering from malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea. The residents told Clinton that women and young girls and boys are often victimized by rape when they leave the camp to go into a nearby forest to gather wood for cooking.
One camp official said a young boy had been raped on Monday.
"We really want to return home, that's why we are asking America to help stop the fighting," Chantale Mapendo, who lives in the camp, told Clinton.
"That's why I'm here," Clinton replied. "I want you to be able to go home."
Clinton appeared visibly moved when she was shown a four-year-old child, held in his mother's arms, who was suffering from extreme malnutrition. Belly distended, eyes hollow, the skeletal boy weighed less than 15 pounds.
"We're proud to help you," Clinton said.
Picking her way through a path littered with volcanic rock, Clinton said she "wanted to see for myself what was happening here."
Clinton flew to came to Goma, the regional capital of war-pocked of the eastern Congo, aboard a U.N. plane over the objections of some top aides who worried about her security and logistics for the visit. Clinton is the first U.S. secretary of state to visit the city, according to the State Department historian's office.
The United Nations has recorded at least 200,000 cases of sexual violence against women and girls in the region since conflict erupted in 1996, something Clinton deplored as "one of mankind's greatest atrocities" before she arrived.
The figures, Clinton told a group university students in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa on Monday, are "astonishing and horrible." She urged the youth of Congo to mount nationwide protests against such abuses and said she would push the government hard on the issue.
Clinton said Tuesday that the people of eastern Congo were still suffering from a "reign of violence" at the hands of rebel groups and the national army, which in January launched a U.N.-backed campaign to pacify the region.
Rights groups have called for a suspension of the operation, which has displaced some 800,000 people from their homes and left hundreds of civilians dead.
Clinton said the U.S. is "very concerned about the civilian casualties, both deaths and rapes and other injuries, from the military action."
But she also said the U.S. supported efforts to eliminate the threat from insurgents and said the U.S. wants the Congolese military professionalized to prevent abuses from the government.
Earlier in the day, Clinton delivered a strong message to Congolese President Joseph Kabila when they met in a tent at a compound in Goma, on the shore of Lake Kivu. Goma is the epicenter of an epidemic of gang rapes and other sexual crimes amid continuing fighting between the army and rebel groups.
After meeting with Kabila, Clinton said impunity for the perpetrators "runs counter to peace and stability for the Congolese people."
She said the U.S. will send a team of legal and financial and other technical experts to come up with specific recommendations for overcoming Congo's problems with corruption. She said Kabila had accepted that offer.
"We do support the efforts to end the militias and the violence they have visited so terribly on the people of the eastern Congo," Clinton said. But she added: "We believe that a disciplined, paid army is a more effective fighting force. We believe that more can be done to protect civilians while you are trying to kill and capture insurgents."
Although fighting has eased since a 2003 peace deal, the army and rebel groups, fighting over eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth, are still attacking villages, killing civilians and committing brutal atrocities.
Members of Kabila's armed forces are accused of taking part in the brutality, including gang rapes that have led to unwanted pregnancies, serious injuries and death to tens of thousands of women and girls.
Earlier this month, a leading human rights group demanded that Congo crack down on sexual violence often perpetrated by military generals and other top officers. It cited U.N. data showing that 7,703 cases of sexual violence by soldiers were reported last year.
Human Rights Watch said the Congolese authorities have failed to prevent the attacks and called on the U.N. Security Council to take tough steps, including travel bans, against individuals or governments that commit or condone sexual violence in Congo and elsewhere.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090811/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/af_clinton_africa
Girl, 9, details rape in Congo to photographer
By Wayne Drash
CNN
(CNN) -- The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school.
The young girl on the right says she was raped by Congolese soldiers. She was just 9 when it happened.
"These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year.
Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist, traveled to the war-torn region of eastern Congo after being awarded the ShootQ Grant, a $10,000 award to free photographers from everyday life to pursue a project that raises awareness of an important global issue.
Borkgren pauses when she speaks of meeting the girl. "She was obviously very traumatized to repeat this out loud, and I don't think she had repeated it to anyone." The young girl lied to her about her age when they first spoke.
"She said she was 15 when she was raped," Borkgren says. "I figured she probably wanted to say she was 15 because it's more acceptable than to say, 'I was 9 when they raped me.' "
The United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, when war broke out with Rwanda and Uganda backing Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-Congo President Laurent Kabila. Rape became a weapon of war, aid groups say.
"It is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or girl," says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who has spent the last 10 years focusing on Congo. "These are often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to humiliate them."
Most times, the women are raped by at least two perpetrators. "Sometimes, that is done in front of the family, in front of the children," Van Woudenberg says. She sighs, "What causes men to rape -- I wish I had an answer to that."
Against this backdrop, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the world's strongest voices for women's rights, traveled to Congo as part of her whirlwind trip to Africa.
Clinton arrived in Goma in eastern Congo Tuesday where she is to meet with rape victims during her visit. "I hope that here in the [Congo] there will be a concerted effort to demand justice for women who are violently attacked, and to make sure that their attackers are punished," Clinton said Monday after a tour of a Kinshasa hospital.
Human rights groups are eager to see if Clinton pressures Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the son of Laurent Kabila, to do more to pursue charges against top army commanders accused of rape.
"Soldiers have committed gang rapes, rapes leading to injury and death, and abductions of girls and women," a report released last month by Human Rights Watch says. "Their crimes are serious violations of international humanitarian law. Commanders have frequently failed to stop sexual violence and may themselves be guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity as a consequence."
Van Woudenberg says punishment, unfortunately, is all too rare for sex crimes. "If you rape, you get away with it," she says.
According to the United Nations, there were 15,996 new cases of sexual violence registered throughout Congo in 2008. Nearly two out of every three rapes were carried out against children, most of them adolescent girls, the Human Rights Watch report says.
A paltry 27 soldiers were convicted in military courts last year. Under the current court system, the military handles accusations of rape against its soldiers -- something aid groups say must be changed for real accountability.
Since January of this year, aid organizations say there's been a surge of violence against civilians as a result of Congolese operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are believed to have participated in 1994's Rwandan genocide. The fighting has left more than 1.8 million people displaced in the volatile region, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Aid groups have started to see an uptick of rapes of men this year, although women and girls remain the primary targets. "The brutality has increased on a huge scale," Van Woudenberg says.
She says she interviewed one 15-year-old girl who was held in a hole for five months and gang-raped nearly every day. She had gone out shopping when soldiers approached.
"They asked me to take off my clothes, and I did. There wasn't much I could do," the girl told her. "They took me into the bush. I stayed for five months with these people, and when I came back, I was five months pregnant."
Van Woudenberg adds, "Gosh, the brutality against the women and girls is unimaginable."
Congo has taken some measures to try to curb the sexual violence. In 2006, its parliament passed a law criminalizing rape, with penalties ranging from five to 20 years. Penalties are doubled under certain circumstances, including gang-rape and if the perpetrator is a public official. Kabila's wife, Olive Lemba Kabila, has launched a public campaign speaking out against rapes of the nation's women and girls.
The army has also started a zero-tolerance campaign in which commanders have emphasized to troops that they must respect human rights and protect civilians from harm, according to the U.N.
In May, the United Nations handed over the names of five top military officers accused of rape. Two of the senior officers are now detained in the capital of Kinshasa and the three others must report to authorities under close observation. "It's expected that a trial could happen soon," said U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi. "It certainly is a big development. ... It's important. It's significant."
Still more must be done, aid groups say, starting with the establishment of a special court made up of Congolese and international judges and prosecutors to investigate rape allegations.
Borkgren, the photographer from Eugene, Oregon, says she went to the Congo after having a dream in which two women yelled at her to "come over here." She won the grant and traveled there for four weeks, beginning in November of last year. She hitchhiked her way around the country, something she now admits was "a little bit stupid."
She says she once came face-to-face with soldiers when she was shopping at a market by herself. One of the men said he wanted to "take me up to his camp." She still can't shake the looks of the local women who were there.
"That was interesting," she says. "When the soldiers were harassing me, the women looked ashamed of the soldiers. And when they saw me tell them, 'No, go away,' the women looked at me quite surprised."
Eventually, she found the girl who touched her heart -- "the great, great kid." Borkgren first spoke with her father, who was initially reluctant to introduce her to his daughter. He explained that the family had gone to authorities, only to be ignored.
Borkgren says that when she met the girl, they got along instantly. At times, the young child didn't know how to describe what happened. "She would say, 'I don't understand what it is, and I don't know what words to use.' "
"It just turned my heart to think that here's this little girl who doesn't even have the words to describe what happened to her, and has to live her life having had this violence put upon her. Just this thoughtless violence that she didn't deserve or ask for. It's so inhumane."
Her images capture a glimpse into that world, of savagery and lost innocence. The soldiers and rebels carrying out the rapes, she says, are misguided people who need help.
Caught in the middle are the innocents: women, girls and fathers struggling to get justice.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/08/11/congo.rape/index.html
CNN
(CNN) -- The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school.
The young girl on the right says she was raped by Congolese soldiers. She was just 9 when it happened.
"These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year.
Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist, traveled to the war-torn region of eastern Congo after being awarded the ShootQ Grant, a $10,000 award to free photographers from everyday life to pursue a project that raises awareness of an important global issue.
Borkgren pauses when she speaks of meeting the girl. "She was obviously very traumatized to repeat this out loud, and I don't think she had repeated it to anyone." The young girl lied to her about her age when they first spoke.
"She said she was 15 when she was raped," Borkgren says. "I figured she probably wanted to say she was 15 because it's more acceptable than to say, 'I was 9 when they raped me.' "
The United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, when war broke out with Rwanda and Uganda backing Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-Congo President Laurent Kabila. Rape became a weapon of war, aid groups say.
"It is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or girl," says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who has spent the last 10 years focusing on Congo. "These are often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to humiliate them."
Most times, the women are raped by at least two perpetrators. "Sometimes, that is done in front of the family, in front of the children," Van Woudenberg says. She sighs, "What causes men to rape -- I wish I had an answer to that."
Against this backdrop, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the world's strongest voices for women's rights, traveled to Congo as part of her whirlwind trip to Africa.
Clinton arrived in Goma in eastern Congo Tuesday where she is to meet with rape victims during her visit. "I hope that here in the [Congo] there will be a concerted effort to demand justice for women who are violently attacked, and to make sure that their attackers are punished," Clinton said Monday after a tour of a Kinshasa hospital.
Human rights groups are eager to see if Clinton pressures Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the son of Laurent Kabila, to do more to pursue charges against top army commanders accused of rape.
"Soldiers have committed gang rapes, rapes leading to injury and death, and abductions of girls and women," a report released last month by Human Rights Watch says. "Their crimes are serious violations of international humanitarian law. Commanders have frequently failed to stop sexual violence and may themselves be guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity as a consequence."
Van Woudenberg says punishment, unfortunately, is all too rare for sex crimes. "If you rape, you get away with it," she says.
According to the United Nations, there were 15,996 new cases of sexual violence registered throughout Congo in 2008. Nearly two out of every three rapes were carried out against children, most of them adolescent girls, the Human Rights Watch report says.
A paltry 27 soldiers were convicted in military courts last year. Under the current court system, the military handles accusations of rape against its soldiers -- something aid groups say must be changed for real accountability.
Since January of this year, aid organizations say there's been a surge of violence against civilians as a result of Congolese operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are believed to have participated in 1994's Rwandan genocide. The fighting has left more than 1.8 million people displaced in the volatile region, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Aid groups have started to see an uptick of rapes of men this year, although women and girls remain the primary targets. "The brutality has increased on a huge scale," Van Woudenberg says.
She says she interviewed one 15-year-old girl who was held in a hole for five months and gang-raped nearly every day. She had gone out shopping when soldiers approached.
"They asked me to take off my clothes, and I did. There wasn't much I could do," the girl told her. "They took me into the bush. I stayed for five months with these people, and when I came back, I was five months pregnant."
Van Woudenberg adds, "Gosh, the brutality against the women and girls is unimaginable."
Congo has taken some measures to try to curb the sexual violence. In 2006, its parliament passed a law criminalizing rape, with penalties ranging from five to 20 years. Penalties are doubled under certain circumstances, including gang-rape and if the perpetrator is a public official. Kabila's wife, Olive Lemba Kabila, has launched a public campaign speaking out against rapes of the nation's women and girls.
The army has also started a zero-tolerance campaign in which commanders have emphasized to troops that they must respect human rights and protect civilians from harm, according to the U.N.
In May, the United Nations handed over the names of five top military officers accused of rape. Two of the senior officers are now detained in the capital of Kinshasa and the three others must report to authorities under close observation. "It's expected that a trial could happen soon," said U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi. "It certainly is a big development. ... It's important. It's significant."
Still more must be done, aid groups say, starting with the establishment of a special court made up of Congolese and international judges and prosecutors to investigate rape allegations.
Borkgren, the photographer from Eugene, Oregon, says she went to the Congo after having a dream in which two women yelled at her to "come over here." She won the grant and traveled there for four weeks, beginning in November of last year. She hitchhiked her way around the country, something she now admits was "a little bit stupid."
She says she once came face-to-face with soldiers when she was shopping at a market by herself. One of the men said he wanted to "take me up to his camp." She still can't shake the looks of the local women who were there.
"That was interesting," she says. "When the soldiers were harassing me, the women looked ashamed of the soldiers. And when they saw me tell them, 'No, go away,' the women looked at me quite surprised."
Eventually, she found the girl who touched her heart -- "the great, great kid." Borkgren first spoke with her father, who was initially reluctant to introduce her to his daughter. He explained that the family had gone to authorities, only to be ignored.
Borkgren says that when she met the girl, they got along instantly. At times, the young child didn't know how to describe what happened. "She would say, 'I don't understand what it is, and I don't know what words to use.' "
"It just turned my heart to think that here's this little girl who doesn't even have the words to describe what happened to her, and has to live her life having had this violence put upon her. Just this thoughtless violence that she didn't deserve or ask for. It's so inhumane."
Her images capture a glimpse into that world, of savagery and lost innocence. The soldiers and rebels carrying out the rapes, she says, are misguided people who need help.
Caught in the middle are the innocents: women, girls and fathers struggling to get justice.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/08/11/congo.rape/index.html
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Clinton's trip to Africa her biggest yet
By Jill Dougherty
CNN Foreign Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embarking on her biggest international trip yet: Africa. Seven countries in 11 days. Issues as diverse as economic entrepreneurship and gender-based violence.
Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa will be her biggest international yet as secretary of state.
The trip comes just three weeks after President Obama's trip to Accra, Ghana. She will highlight many of the themes he struck.
The State Department notes it is the earliest trip by a secretary of state and a president to Africa of any previous U.S. administration. In an administration that prides itself on a plethora of "priorities," officials say they are putting Africa toward the top of the list.
The secretary opens her Africa trip in Nairobi, Kenya, at the U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, delivering a speech Wednesday at the forum's ministerial opening ceremony.
In Kenya, she plans to meet with President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, encouraging them to proceed with their intention to rewrite the country's constitution. The East Africa country was hit with a wave of violence a year and a half ago following flawed presidential elections.
Also in Kenya, she will meet briefly with Somalia's president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. His country is under intense pressure from Islamist extremist movements affiliated with al Qaeda, al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.
On her next stop, South Africa, she will meet with the country's new leader, President Jacob Zuma, and the foreign minister. At the top of the agenda for the country, under severe economic pressure, are the crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe and the battle against HIV/AIDS.
The State Department describes her next destination, Angola, as a country with "enormous economic potential." Angola, in southern Africa, is one of the largest energy producers south of the Sahara and is a major supplier of both petroleum and liquified natural gas to the U.S. market.
There are some trouble spots on the secretary's trip, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa is one of them. For more than 15 years, eastern Congo was torn by civil strife and massive use of rape. Clinton will meet with some of the victims of that violence to underscore the United States' commitment ending gender-based violence.
In Nigeria, Secretary Clinton will see what the State Department calls "probably the most important country in sub-Saharan Africa." With 140 million people, it is a major source of petroleum imports for the United States. The secretary will discuss security in West Africa, democratic development, fighting corruption and promoting economic development with the Nigerian government.
In Liberia, founded by slaves from the United States, Clinton will reaffirm U.S. support for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the only female African president. Besieged by violent conflict for 20 years, the West African nation, still fragile, now is strengthening its democracy, and Clinton will highlight development assistance.
Last stop: Cape Verde, which the State Department calls "an African success story." The island nation, off the coast of West Africa, is democratically run and well-managed.
In its briefings for reporters on Clinton's African trip, the State Department has not specifically stressed human rights although, as with other parts of the world, it links development and human rights.
Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox, in a letter to Clinton, is urging her to discuss human-rights concerns with the African leaders she will meet this week.
"Failure to discuss human rights abuses in a meaningful way," he says, "would send the wrong signal about the seriousness with which the United States views the human rights situation in those countries."
China has launched a broad economic outreach to Africa. Asked whether Clinton's trip is a way of sending a message to Beijing, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson said, "Our presence there has nothing to do with anyone else's operations on the continent. The mention of our colleagues from Asia is a Cold War paradigm, not a reflection of where we are today."
Evaluating the prospects for Clinton's African trip, J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic & International Studies said Clinton "may be signaling through the scope and timing of her trip that Africa has graduated into a mainstream U.S. foreign policy priority and that she intends to guide U.S. policy. That would be a significant shift."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/03/clinton.africa.trip/index.html
CNN Foreign Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embarking on her biggest international trip yet: Africa. Seven countries in 11 days. Issues as diverse as economic entrepreneurship and gender-based violence.
Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa will be her biggest international yet as secretary of state.
The trip comes just three weeks after President Obama's trip to Accra, Ghana. She will highlight many of the themes he struck.
The State Department notes it is the earliest trip by a secretary of state and a president to Africa of any previous U.S. administration. In an administration that prides itself on a plethora of "priorities," officials say they are putting Africa toward the top of the list.
The secretary opens her Africa trip in Nairobi, Kenya, at the U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, delivering a speech Wednesday at the forum's ministerial opening ceremony.
In Kenya, she plans to meet with President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, encouraging them to proceed with their intention to rewrite the country's constitution. The East Africa country was hit with a wave of violence a year and a half ago following flawed presidential elections.
Also in Kenya, she will meet briefly with Somalia's president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. His country is under intense pressure from Islamist extremist movements affiliated with al Qaeda, al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.
On her next stop, South Africa, she will meet with the country's new leader, President Jacob Zuma, and the foreign minister. At the top of the agenda for the country, under severe economic pressure, are the crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe and the battle against HIV/AIDS.
The State Department describes her next destination, Angola, as a country with "enormous economic potential." Angola, in southern Africa, is one of the largest energy producers south of the Sahara and is a major supplier of both petroleum and liquified natural gas to the U.S. market.
There are some trouble spots on the secretary's trip, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa is one of them. For more than 15 years, eastern Congo was torn by civil strife and massive use of rape. Clinton will meet with some of the victims of that violence to underscore the United States' commitment ending gender-based violence.
In Nigeria, Secretary Clinton will see what the State Department calls "probably the most important country in sub-Saharan Africa." With 140 million people, it is a major source of petroleum imports for the United States. The secretary will discuss security in West Africa, democratic development, fighting corruption and promoting economic development with the Nigerian government.
In Liberia, founded by slaves from the United States, Clinton will reaffirm U.S. support for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the only female African president. Besieged by violent conflict for 20 years, the West African nation, still fragile, now is strengthening its democracy, and Clinton will highlight development assistance.
Last stop: Cape Verde, which the State Department calls "an African success story." The island nation, off the coast of West Africa, is democratically run and well-managed.
In its briefings for reporters on Clinton's African trip, the State Department has not specifically stressed human rights although, as with other parts of the world, it links development and human rights.
Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox, in a letter to Clinton, is urging her to discuss human-rights concerns with the African leaders she will meet this week.
"Failure to discuss human rights abuses in a meaningful way," he says, "would send the wrong signal about the seriousness with which the United States views the human rights situation in those countries."
China has launched a broad economic outreach to Africa. Asked whether Clinton's trip is a way of sending a message to Beijing, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson said, "Our presence there has nothing to do with anyone else's operations on the continent. The mention of our colleagues from Asia is a Cold War paradigm, not a reflection of where we are today."
Evaluating the prospects for Clinton's African trip, J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic & International Studies said Clinton "may be signaling through the scope and timing of her trip that Africa has graduated into a mainstream U.S. foreign policy priority and that she intends to guide U.S. policy. That would be a significant shift."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/03/clinton.africa.trip/index.html
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
First Blood Diamonds, Now Blood Computers?
By ELIZABETH DIAS Elizabeth Dias – Sat Jul 25, 12:45 pm ET
When the film Blood Diamond came out in 2006, people were startled at the alleged origins of the precious stones from areas of bloody conflict and began asking whether the jewels on their fingers cost a human life. Will consumers soon find themselves asking similar questions about their cell phones and computers?
In a report released earlier this week, Global Witness claims that multinational companies are furthering a trade in minerals at the heart of the hi-tech industry that feeds the horrendous civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). (Global Witness is the same nongovernmental organization that helped expose the violence that plagues many of the sources of diamonds.) However, the accused companies, with varying degrees of hostility, deny any culpability, saying Global Witness oversimplifies a complex economic process in a chaotic geopolitial setting.
The provinces of North and South Kivu in the eastern DRC are filled with mines of cassiterite, wolframite, coltan and gold - minerals needed to manufacture everything from lightbulbs to laptops, from MP3 players to Playstations. Over the past 12 years of armed conflict in the region, control of these valuable natural resources has allegedly become a lucrative way for warring parties to purchase munitions and fund their fighting. The Global Witness report claims to have followed the supply chain of these minerals from warring parties to middlemen to international buyers.
By the time metals reach electronics companies, they may have changed hands as many as seven times. This means that without a clear supply history, when a consumer sets her cell phone to vibrate, a function enabled through the mineral wolframite, it is virtually impossible for her to know whether she is using wolframite mined in the eastern DRC, the site of horrific fighting and killing. More than 5 million people have been killed since the conflict began in 1996, some through direct abuse, others through the political and economic chaos that the conflict has created. Armed groups frequently force civilians to mine the minerals, extorting taxes and refusing to pay wages. The report quotes one miner from South Kivu: "We are their meat, their animals. We have nothing to say."
According to Global Witness, although the Congolese army and FDLR rebel groups have been warring on opposite sides for years, they are collaborators in the mining effort, at times providing each other with road and airport access and even sharing their spoils. Researchers say they found evidence that the mineral trade is much more extensive and profitable than previously suspected: one Congolese government official reported that at least 90% of all gold exports from the country were undeclared. And the report charges that the failure of foreign governments to crack down on illicit mining and trade has undercut development endeavors undertaken by the international community in the war-torn region.
The study, Faced with a Gun, What Can You Do?, raises questions about the involvement of nearly 240 companies spanning the mineral, metal and technology industries. It specifically fingers four main European and Asian companies as open buyers in this trade: Thailand Smelting and Refining Corp. (owned by British Amalgamated Metal Corp.), British Afrimex, Belgian Trademet and Traxys. And it questions the role of others further down the manufacturing chain, including prominent electronics companies Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Dell and Motorola. Even though the companies may be acting legally, Global Witness criticizes their lack of due diligence and transparency standards at every level of their supply chain.
British Amalgamated Metal Corp. (AMC) firmly denies the accusations, citing its standing objective to improve visibility so that warring parties do not benefit from trade. "We are disappointed with the number of inaccuracies and omissions in the report and are concerned that all the facts should be properly represented in a balanced way," AMC said. The company statement went on to say, "We are concerned that Global Witness' approach will lead to a de facto ban on the trade which we do not believe is in either the short term or the long term interests of the Congo either economically, politically or socially."
Traxys CEO Mark Kristoff told TIME that his company suspended trade in the DRC in May 2009 until there is a clearer road map for cooperation among companies, the U.N. and governments for a plan of social action. He added that Traxys' $50 million in trade in the DRC is equivalent to 1% of the company's total business. Afrimex told TIME via e-mail that its last shipment from the DRC took place in September 2008 and all such transactions have since ceased. "Any link between Afrimex's past mineral-trading and armed groups remain wholly unfounded," the statement said. "We remain at a loss to understand why Afrimex is still being mentioned by Global Witness." Global Witness spokesperson Amy Barry said, "Just because they have claimed to stop sourcing at this point doesn't change the fact that they were sourcing during our research. So we still think that the evidence we uncovered is worth bringing to the public's attention."
Other companies were less confrontational. In a statement, Hewlett-Packard said, "We are helping to address this serious concern through voluntary measures. Ensuring that electronics manufacturing does not contribute to human-rights violations in the DRC takes co-operation and commitment within every layer of the supply base."
Some of the companies named in the report defend their business in the DRC by noting that their practices abide by the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct or the ethical principles of the International Tin Research Institute. Global Witness calls for higher standards in these industry guidelines to successfully monitor trade systems in conflict areas. "I don't think there's an obvious or easy answer" to the supply-chain problem, says Global Witness spokesperson Barry. "We are absolutely not calling for companies to pull out because we acknowledge it is a legitimate source of livelihood." The group's chief Congo researcher, Carina Tertsakian, puts it this way: "This is a question of will. If the companies are serious about trading in a way that is clean, they have the means to do it."
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1912594,00.html
When the film Blood Diamond came out in 2006, people were startled at the alleged origins of the precious stones from areas of bloody conflict and began asking whether the jewels on their fingers cost a human life. Will consumers soon find themselves asking similar questions about their cell phones and computers?
In a report released earlier this week, Global Witness claims that multinational companies are furthering a trade in minerals at the heart of the hi-tech industry that feeds the horrendous civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). (Global Witness is the same nongovernmental organization that helped expose the violence that plagues many of the sources of diamonds.) However, the accused companies, with varying degrees of hostility, deny any culpability, saying Global Witness oversimplifies a complex economic process in a chaotic geopolitial setting.
The provinces of North and South Kivu in the eastern DRC are filled with mines of cassiterite, wolframite, coltan and gold - minerals needed to manufacture everything from lightbulbs to laptops, from MP3 players to Playstations. Over the past 12 years of armed conflict in the region, control of these valuable natural resources has allegedly become a lucrative way for warring parties to purchase munitions and fund their fighting. The Global Witness report claims to have followed the supply chain of these minerals from warring parties to middlemen to international buyers.
By the time metals reach electronics companies, they may have changed hands as many as seven times. This means that without a clear supply history, when a consumer sets her cell phone to vibrate, a function enabled through the mineral wolframite, it is virtually impossible for her to know whether she is using wolframite mined in the eastern DRC, the site of horrific fighting and killing. More than 5 million people have been killed since the conflict began in 1996, some through direct abuse, others through the political and economic chaos that the conflict has created. Armed groups frequently force civilians to mine the minerals, extorting taxes and refusing to pay wages. The report quotes one miner from South Kivu: "We are their meat, their animals. We have nothing to say."
According to Global Witness, although the Congolese army and FDLR rebel groups have been warring on opposite sides for years, they are collaborators in the mining effort, at times providing each other with road and airport access and even sharing their spoils. Researchers say they found evidence that the mineral trade is much more extensive and profitable than previously suspected: one Congolese government official reported that at least 90% of all gold exports from the country were undeclared. And the report charges that the failure of foreign governments to crack down on illicit mining and trade has undercut development endeavors undertaken by the international community in the war-torn region.
The study, Faced with a Gun, What Can You Do?, raises questions about the involvement of nearly 240 companies spanning the mineral, metal and technology industries. It specifically fingers four main European and Asian companies as open buyers in this trade: Thailand Smelting and Refining Corp. (owned by British Amalgamated Metal Corp.), British Afrimex, Belgian Trademet and Traxys. And it questions the role of others further down the manufacturing chain, including prominent electronics companies Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Dell and Motorola. Even though the companies may be acting legally, Global Witness criticizes their lack of due diligence and transparency standards at every level of their supply chain.
British Amalgamated Metal Corp. (AMC) firmly denies the accusations, citing its standing objective to improve visibility so that warring parties do not benefit from trade. "We are disappointed with the number of inaccuracies and omissions in the report and are concerned that all the facts should be properly represented in a balanced way," AMC said. The company statement went on to say, "We are concerned that Global Witness' approach will lead to a de facto ban on the trade which we do not believe is in either the short term or the long term interests of the Congo either economically, politically or socially."
Traxys CEO Mark Kristoff told TIME that his company suspended trade in the DRC in May 2009 until there is a clearer road map for cooperation among companies, the U.N. and governments for a plan of social action. He added that Traxys' $50 million in trade in the DRC is equivalent to 1% of the company's total business. Afrimex told TIME via e-mail that its last shipment from the DRC took place in September 2008 and all such transactions have since ceased. "Any link between Afrimex's past mineral-trading and armed groups remain wholly unfounded," the statement said. "We remain at a loss to understand why Afrimex is still being mentioned by Global Witness." Global Witness spokesperson Amy Barry said, "Just because they have claimed to stop sourcing at this point doesn't change the fact that they were sourcing during our research. So we still think that the evidence we uncovered is worth bringing to the public's attention."
Other companies were less confrontational. In a statement, Hewlett-Packard said, "We are helping to address this serious concern through voluntary measures. Ensuring that electronics manufacturing does not contribute to human-rights violations in the DRC takes co-operation and commitment within every layer of the supply base."
Some of the companies named in the report defend their business in the DRC by noting that their practices abide by the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct or the ethical principles of the International Tin Research Institute. Global Witness calls for higher standards in these industry guidelines to successfully monitor trade systems in conflict areas. "I don't think there's an obvious or easy answer" to the supply-chain problem, says Global Witness spokesperson Barry. "We are absolutely not calling for companies to pull out because we acknowledge it is a legitimate source of livelihood." The group's chief Congo researcher, Carina Tertsakian, puts it this way: "This is a question of will. If the companies are serious about trading in a way that is clean, they have the means to do it."
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1912594,00.html
Friday, June 19, 2009
Silence=Rape
By Jan Goodwin
Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who'd disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts.
"This little girl couldn't walk, couldn't talk when she arrived here. Shashir had to be surgically repaired. I don't know if she can be mentally repaired," says Faida Veronique, a 47-year-old cook at Doctors on Call for Service (DOCS), a tented hospital in the eastern city of Goma, who took in the brutalized child.
"Why do they rape a child?" asks Marie-Madeleine Kisoni, a Congolese counselor who works with raped women and children. "We don't understand. There's a spirit of bestiality here now. I've seen 2- and 3-year-olds raped. The rebels want to kill us, but it's more painful to kill the spirit instead."
In the Congo today, age is clearly no protection from rape. A woman named Maria was 70 when the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that led Rwanda's 1994 genocide and now number between 20,000 and 30,000 of the estimated 140,000 rebels in the DRC, came to her home. "They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me, one after the other," she told me. "Then they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted." During the attack Maria's entire family--five sons, three daughters and her husband--were murdered. "War came. I just saw smoke and fire. Then my life and my health were taken away," she says. The tiny septuagenarian with the sunken eyes was left with a massive fistula where her bladder was torn, causing permanent incontinence. She hid in the bush for three years out of fear that the rebels might return, and out of shame over her constantly soiled clothes. Yet Maria was one of the more fortunate ones. She'd finally made it to a hospital. Two months before we met, she had undergone reconstructive surgery. The outcome is uncertain, however, and she still requires a catheter.
Rape has become a defining characteristic of the five-year war in the DRC, says Anneke Van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch. So, too, has mutilation of the victims. "Last year, I was stunned when a 30-year-old woman in North Kivu had her lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out after she was raped, so she couldn't identify or testify against her attackers. Now, we are seeing more and more such cases," she says. As the rebels constantly seek new ways to terrorize, their barbarity becomes more frenzied.
I, too, was sickened by what I saw and heard. In three decades of covering war, I had never before come across the cases described to me by Congolese doctors, such as gang-rape victims having their labia pierced and then padlocked. "They usually die of massive infection," I was told.
Based on personal testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch, it is estimated that as many as 30 percent of rape victims are sexually tortured and mutilated during the assaults, usually with spears, machetes, sticks or gun barrels thrust into their vaginas. Increasingly, the trigger is being pulled. About 40 percent of rape victims, usually the younger ones, aged 8 to 19, are abducted and forced to become sex slaves. "The country is in an utter state of lawlessness; it's complete anarchy," says Woudenberg. "In this culture of impunity, people know they can get away with anything. Every armed group is equally culpable."
In the Congo, rape is a cheaper weapon of war than bullets. Experts estimate that some 60 percent of all combatants in the DRC are infected with HIV/AIDS. As women rarely have access to expensive antiretroviral drugs, sexual assaults all too often become automatic death sentences. Médecins Sans Frontières operates five health clinics offering antiretrovirals in the conflict zone of northeastern DRC, but many women don't know about the drugs and cannot travel safely to the centers. Moreover, according to Helen O'Neill, a nurse who set up MSF's sexual-violence treatment program, such drugs must be taken within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of the rape to prevent infection. If a woman has been exposed to the virus, the treatment is 80 percent effective. But in the Congo, rape victims who are not captive sex slaves must walk for days or weeks, often with massive injuries, and risk new capture by roving rebel bands, before reaching assistance.
"So far, 30 percent of rape victims being treated at our hospital are infected with HIV/AIDS," says Dr. Denis Mukwege, the French-trained medical director of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. "And nearly 50 percent are infected with venereal diseases like syphilis that greatly increase their chances of contracting HIV."
Rape as a weapon of war is as old as war itself. What has changed recently is that sexual violence is no longer considered just a byproduct of conflict but is being viewed as a war crime, says Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now, a New York-based international women's human rights organization. "Rape as a violation of war was codified in the Geneva Convention, but only now is it being taken seriously. But it is still not effectively prosecuted, not proportional to the extent that sexual violence takes place," she says. Armed forces now have a legal obligation to stop rape and hold the offenders accountable. "This is a major shift in consciousness. But it needs to be followed by a major shift in conduct," says Neuwirth.
In the DRC, rape is used to terrorize, humiliate and punish the enemy. Frequently husbands, fathers and children are forced to watch and even participate. Women sexually assaulted by members of one rebel organization are accused of being the wives of that group and raped again as punishment when a new militia takes over the area. "It's happened repeatedly to the women of Shabunda in the far east of the Congo, every time the region has changed hands," says Woudenberg.
Even the camps for internally displaced people are not safe. The barbed-wire encampment in Bunia is home to more than 14,000 people, but enemy militia infiltrate at night. Shortly before I arrived, an 11-year-old girl was dragged off and gang-raped, a not uncommon occurrence. There are more than 3 million internally displaced people made homeless by the war, many of whom have been forced to flee over and over again. UN officers admit they have nowhere near the numbers they need to be effective, or even to stay safe themselves.
"The rebels are all around us here. We don't feel secure and we've seen what these guys do to people, especially to women and girls. Our own people have been killed, after they were horribly tortured," a European UN major told me. "The DRC is the size of Western Europe. We're supposed to have 8,500 troops here, but we've only got 5,000! I was in Bosnia, which is a fraction of the size of the Congo, and we had 68,000 NATO troops, and even that wasn't enough." Patrols of MONUC, the UN's peacekeeping force in the DRC, have refused to pick up wounded rape victims and escort them to medical care when they were afraid they would be outnumbered by nearby rebels.
"People denounce the rapes but do nothing to bring the rebels to justice," says Woudenberg. "There isn't the political will, domestically or internationally, to make it happen. I've never seen anything like this, when war has become this horrible, and human life so undervalued."
Trevor Lowe, spokesperson for the UN World Food Program, echoes this view. "The nature of sexual violence in the DRC conflict is grotesque, completely abnormal," he says. "Babies, children, women--nobody is being spared. For every woman speaking out, there are hundreds who've not yet emerged from the hell. Rape is so stigmatized in the DRC, and people are afraid of reprisals from rebels. It's a complete and utter breakdown of norms. Like Rwanda, only worse." Adds his colleague Christiane Berthiaume, "Never before have we found as many victims of rape in conflict situations as we are discovering in the DRC."
Yet where is the international media coverage? The outrage? The demand for justice?
During the Rwanda genocide, rape as a war crime received extensive international media coverage. Despite initial reports of 250,000 women being sexually assaulted (a third more than there were Tutsi women living in the country at the time), evidence later suggested the total number was closer to one-fifth of that.
In Bosnia, where the European Community Investigative Mission concluded there were some 20,000 victims, reports of systematic rape by the Serbs first made international headlines one year into the war, and remained a major news focus for the remaining three years of the conflict. It was only after the Bosnia war, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 1997, that rape was first prosecuted as a crime against humanity. A year later, at the Rwanda tribunal, rape was found to be a form of genocide.
Everyone I spoke with in the DRC and in the international UN, NGO and human rights community said they believe the incidence of rape there greatly exceeds that in both Bosnia and Rwanda, although it will be years before precise figures are available. The systematic nature of the assaults has been amply documented by the UN, humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations. Yet for the most part the media look the other way. As one editor of a national newspaper told me, "It's just another horror in the horror that is Africa." One has to ask, Does this kind of cynicism merely reflect public opinion or help create it?
Says Lowe, "Look at the square footage of Bosnia, a country that is dwarfed by the Congo, and look at the enormous number of reporters who covered Bosnia compared to the DRC. Clearly, Africa doesn't get the same coverage as Europe. The reasons are racial, geopolitical interests, ease of access, etc. The DRC conflict is an extremely dangerous one, which is one reason the press is not there. Selling Africa, and being part of an agency that does it all the time, is difficult. Africa is clearly not a place where the major powers have a lot of interest. The Congo is not on the geopolitical map. And the major-league press follows that geopolitical map." There is also media faddishness, what Lowe refers to as the CNN factor. "If CNN shows up, then other reporters become interested," he says.
Another factor is the complexity of the Congo conflict. In Rwanda, the media were able to present the issues as clear-cut, with the good guys and the bad clearly defined. "People consider the Congo conflict confusing; they label it tribal or ethnic, which is totally wrong," says Woudenberg. "The war in the DRC has been an international war, involving a number of different countries."
Conduct a straw poll among Americans who are usually well informed and few know of the vicious campaign of sexual violence against women in the DRC. Many are even unaware that the country is six years into a brutal conflict, in which up to 4.7 million people have died--the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II. Or that six countries--Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia--have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC, and helping to plunder the country's tremendous mineral wealth to fill their coffers.
The indifference, according to Woudenberg, extends to the arms of government that should be most deeply concerned with the DRC's crisis. "In November I tried to raise the issue with the US Mission to the UN in New York, and they told me fairly point-blank that they were aware rape was going on in the Congo, and it was just not high on their priorities," she says. "I had a similar response from the US State Department."
Meanwhile, a UN Security Council panel has cited eighty-five multinational corporations, including some of the largest US companies in their fields, for their involvement in the illegal exploitation of natural resources from the DRC. The commerce in these "blood" minerals, such as coltan, used in cell phones and laptops, cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium (Congolese uranium was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), drives the conflict. The brutality of the militias--the sexual slavery, transmission of HIV/AIDS through rape, cannibalism, slaughter and starvation, forced recruitment of child soldiers--has routinely been employed to secure access to mining sites or insure a supply of captive labor.
If that isn't enough to awaken the international community's interest, one would think it would be of concern that "blood" business practices also fund terrorism. Lebanese diamond traders benefiting from illegal concessions in the Congo have been tied to the Islamic extremist groups Amal and Hezbollah. According to a UN report, the Lebanese traders, who operate licensed diamond businesses in Antwerp, purchased diamonds from the DRC worth $150 million in 2001 alone. Such linkage between African rebel groups and global terrorist movements is not new. Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front reportedly sold diamonds to Al Qaeda, thus helping to finance both organizations.
The lobbies of the two luxury hotels in Kinshasa, the DRC's capital, are full of elegant, $5,000-a-day corporate lawyers from New York, London and Geneva, and scruffier diamond dealers from Tel Aviv and Antwerp, as they while away the hours waiting for government ministers and senior representatives of armed groups to smooth their way. These institutional fortune-makers are 1,800 miles away from the nightmares of northeastern Congo. Yet they are not so far removed from the atrocities perpetrated there. Rape is a crime of the war they are fueling with their greed.
Today's conflict profiteers are not the first to sponsor a campaign to ransack, rape, pillage and plunder in the Congo. A century ago, Belgium's King Leopold II amassed a fabulous fortune this way. During the monarch's genocidal reign of terror, when villagers couldn't meet his impossibly high quotas harvesting rubber or mining ore, their hands were amputated and women were taken as slaves. By the time he was finished, an estimated 10 million Congolese, half the population, were dead.
Kinshasa's policy-makers, who serve in a government with four vice presidents in a misguided attempt to appease various factions, now claim a new political beginning after the so-called peace accord last year. But there is a "huge and dangerous gap" between what is happening in Kinshasa and what is going on in the northeast, says Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general. "In Kinshasa there is talk of peace and political progress, of regional harmony and democratic elections. But while the newly appointed members of government are wrangling for power and privilege in Kinshasa, in the Kivus and Ituri people are confronted daily with death, plunder and carnage. Mutilations and massacres continue. Rape of women and girls has become a standard tactic of warfare. It is absolutely outrageous that many of the senior members of the government and the political parties they represent are closely linked to the armed groups who are committing these abuses."
At the time of King Leopold's predatory rule, an international Congo reform movement was formed with the support of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad. It was Conrad who described what was being done as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." He would recognize what is happening now.
For the sake of 6-year-old Shashir and tens of thousands of girls and women who have been infected with HIV/AIDS, forcibly impregnated or so badly damaged internally they will never be able to have children, and who are so psychologically traumatized they may never recover, we can only hope that a similarly prominent group of today's social commentators will find its conscience and its voice soon.
This article appeared in the March 8, 2004 edition of The Nation.
Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who'd disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts.
"This little girl couldn't walk, couldn't talk when she arrived here. Shashir had to be surgically repaired. I don't know if she can be mentally repaired," says Faida Veronique, a 47-year-old cook at Doctors on Call for Service (DOCS), a tented hospital in the eastern city of Goma, who took in the brutalized child.
"Why do they rape a child?" asks Marie-Madeleine Kisoni, a Congolese counselor who works with raped women and children. "We don't understand. There's a spirit of bestiality here now. I've seen 2- and 3-year-olds raped. The rebels want to kill us, but it's more painful to kill the spirit instead."
In the Congo today, age is clearly no protection from rape. A woman named Maria was 70 when the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that led Rwanda's 1994 genocide and now number between 20,000 and 30,000 of the estimated 140,000 rebels in the DRC, came to her home. "They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me, one after the other," she told me. "Then they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted." During the attack Maria's entire family--five sons, three daughters and her husband--were murdered. "War came. I just saw smoke and fire. Then my life and my health were taken away," she says. The tiny septuagenarian with the sunken eyes was left with a massive fistula where her bladder was torn, causing permanent incontinence. She hid in the bush for three years out of fear that the rebels might return, and out of shame over her constantly soiled clothes. Yet Maria was one of the more fortunate ones. She'd finally made it to a hospital. Two months before we met, she had undergone reconstructive surgery. The outcome is uncertain, however, and she still requires a catheter.
Rape has become a defining characteristic of the five-year war in the DRC, says Anneke Van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch. So, too, has mutilation of the victims. "Last year, I was stunned when a 30-year-old woman in North Kivu had her lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out after she was raped, so she couldn't identify or testify against her attackers. Now, we are seeing more and more such cases," she says. As the rebels constantly seek new ways to terrorize, their barbarity becomes more frenzied.
I, too, was sickened by what I saw and heard. In three decades of covering war, I had never before come across the cases described to me by Congolese doctors, such as gang-rape victims having their labia pierced and then padlocked. "They usually die of massive infection," I was told.
Based on personal testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch, it is estimated that as many as 30 percent of rape victims are sexually tortured and mutilated during the assaults, usually with spears, machetes, sticks or gun barrels thrust into their vaginas. Increasingly, the trigger is being pulled. About 40 percent of rape victims, usually the younger ones, aged 8 to 19, are abducted and forced to become sex slaves. "The country is in an utter state of lawlessness; it's complete anarchy," says Woudenberg. "In this culture of impunity, people know they can get away with anything. Every armed group is equally culpable."
In the Congo, rape is a cheaper weapon of war than bullets. Experts estimate that some 60 percent of all combatants in the DRC are infected with HIV/AIDS. As women rarely have access to expensive antiretroviral drugs, sexual assaults all too often become automatic death sentences. Médecins Sans Frontières operates five health clinics offering antiretrovirals in the conflict zone of northeastern DRC, but many women don't know about the drugs and cannot travel safely to the centers. Moreover, according to Helen O'Neill, a nurse who set up MSF's sexual-violence treatment program, such drugs must be taken within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of the rape to prevent infection. If a woman has been exposed to the virus, the treatment is 80 percent effective. But in the Congo, rape victims who are not captive sex slaves must walk for days or weeks, often with massive injuries, and risk new capture by roving rebel bands, before reaching assistance.
"So far, 30 percent of rape victims being treated at our hospital are infected with HIV/AIDS," says Dr. Denis Mukwege, the French-trained medical director of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. "And nearly 50 percent are infected with venereal diseases like syphilis that greatly increase their chances of contracting HIV."
Rape as a weapon of war is as old as war itself. What has changed recently is that sexual violence is no longer considered just a byproduct of conflict but is being viewed as a war crime, says Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now, a New York-based international women's human rights organization. "Rape as a violation of war was codified in the Geneva Convention, but only now is it being taken seriously. But it is still not effectively prosecuted, not proportional to the extent that sexual violence takes place," she says. Armed forces now have a legal obligation to stop rape and hold the offenders accountable. "This is a major shift in consciousness. But it needs to be followed by a major shift in conduct," says Neuwirth.
In the DRC, rape is used to terrorize, humiliate and punish the enemy. Frequently husbands, fathers and children are forced to watch and even participate. Women sexually assaulted by members of one rebel organization are accused of being the wives of that group and raped again as punishment when a new militia takes over the area. "It's happened repeatedly to the women of Shabunda in the far east of the Congo, every time the region has changed hands," says Woudenberg.
Even the camps for internally displaced people are not safe. The barbed-wire encampment in Bunia is home to more than 14,000 people, but enemy militia infiltrate at night. Shortly before I arrived, an 11-year-old girl was dragged off and gang-raped, a not uncommon occurrence. There are more than 3 million internally displaced people made homeless by the war, many of whom have been forced to flee over and over again. UN officers admit they have nowhere near the numbers they need to be effective, or even to stay safe themselves.
"The rebels are all around us here. We don't feel secure and we've seen what these guys do to people, especially to women and girls. Our own people have been killed, after they were horribly tortured," a European UN major told me. "The DRC is the size of Western Europe. We're supposed to have 8,500 troops here, but we've only got 5,000! I was in Bosnia, which is a fraction of the size of the Congo, and we had 68,000 NATO troops, and even that wasn't enough." Patrols of MONUC, the UN's peacekeeping force in the DRC, have refused to pick up wounded rape victims and escort them to medical care when they were afraid they would be outnumbered by nearby rebels.
"People denounce the rapes but do nothing to bring the rebels to justice," says Woudenberg. "There isn't the political will, domestically or internationally, to make it happen. I've never seen anything like this, when war has become this horrible, and human life so undervalued."
Trevor Lowe, spokesperson for the UN World Food Program, echoes this view. "The nature of sexual violence in the DRC conflict is grotesque, completely abnormal," he says. "Babies, children, women--nobody is being spared. For every woman speaking out, there are hundreds who've not yet emerged from the hell. Rape is so stigmatized in the DRC, and people are afraid of reprisals from rebels. It's a complete and utter breakdown of norms. Like Rwanda, only worse." Adds his colleague Christiane Berthiaume, "Never before have we found as many victims of rape in conflict situations as we are discovering in the DRC."
Yet where is the international media coverage? The outrage? The demand for justice?
During the Rwanda genocide, rape as a war crime received extensive international media coverage. Despite initial reports of 250,000 women being sexually assaulted (a third more than there were Tutsi women living in the country at the time), evidence later suggested the total number was closer to one-fifth of that.
In Bosnia, where the European Community Investigative Mission concluded there were some 20,000 victims, reports of systematic rape by the Serbs first made international headlines one year into the war, and remained a major news focus for the remaining three years of the conflict. It was only after the Bosnia war, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 1997, that rape was first prosecuted as a crime against humanity. A year later, at the Rwanda tribunal, rape was found to be a form of genocide.
Everyone I spoke with in the DRC and in the international UN, NGO and human rights community said they believe the incidence of rape there greatly exceeds that in both Bosnia and Rwanda, although it will be years before precise figures are available. The systematic nature of the assaults has been amply documented by the UN, humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations. Yet for the most part the media look the other way. As one editor of a national newspaper told me, "It's just another horror in the horror that is Africa." One has to ask, Does this kind of cynicism merely reflect public opinion or help create it?
Says Lowe, "Look at the square footage of Bosnia, a country that is dwarfed by the Congo, and look at the enormous number of reporters who covered Bosnia compared to the DRC. Clearly, Africa doesn't get the same coverage as Europe. The reasons are racial, geopolitical interests, ease of access, etc. The DRC conflict is an extremely dangerous one, which is one reason the press is not there. Selling Africa, and being part of an agency that does it all the time, is difficult. Africa is clearly not a place where the major powers have a lot of interest. The Congo is not on the geopolitical map. And the major-league press follows that geopolitical map." There is also media faddishness, what Lowe refers to as the CNN factor. "If CNN shows up, then other reporters become interested," he says.
Another factor is the complexity of the Congo conflict. In Rwanda, the media were able to present the issues as clear-cut, with the good guys and the bad clearly defined. "People consider the Congo conflict confusing; they label it tribal or ethnic, which is totally wrong," says Woudenberg. "The war in the DRC has been an international war, involving a number of different countries."
Conduct a straw poll among Americans who are usually well informed and few know of the vicious campaign of sexual violence against women in the DRC. Many are even unaware that the country is six years into a brutal conflict, in which up to 4.7 million people have died--the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II. Or that six countries--Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia--have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC, and helping to plunder the country's tremendous mineral wealth to fill their coffers.
The indifference, according to Woudenberg, extends to the arms of government that should be most deeply concerned with the DRC's crisis. "In November I tried to raise the issue with the US Mission to the UN in New York, and they told me fairly point-blank that they were aware rape was going on in the Congo, and it was just not high on their priorities," she says. "I had a similar response from the US State Department."
Meanwhile, a UN Security Council panel has cited eighty-five multinational corporations, including some of the largest US companies in their fields, for their involvement in the illegal exploitation of natural resources from the DRC. The commerce in these "blood" minerals, such as coltan, used in cell phones and laptops, cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium (Congolese uranium was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), drives the conflict. The brutality of the militias--the sexual slavery, transmission of HIV/AIDS through rape, cannibalism, slaughter and starvation, forced recruitment of child soldiers--has routinely been employed to secure access to mining sites or insure a supply of captive labor.
If that isn't enough to awaken the international community's interest, one would think it would be of concern that "blood" business practices also fund terrorism. Lebanese diamond traders benefiting from illegal concessions in the Congo have been tied to the Islamic extremist groups Amal and Hezbollah. According to a UN report, the Lebanese traders, who operate licensed diamond businesses in Antwerp, purchased diamonds from the DRC worth $150 million in 2001 alone. Such linkage between African rebel groups and global terrorist movements is not new. Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front reportedly sold diamonds to Al Qaeda, thus helping to finance both organizations.
The lobbies of the two luxury hotels in Kinshasa, the DRC's capital, are full of elegant, $5,000-a-day corporate lawyers from New York, London and Geneva, and scruffier diamond dealers from Tel Aviv and Antwerp, as they while away the hours waiting for government ministers and senior representatives of armed groups to smooth their way. These institutional fortune-makers are 1,800 miles away from the nightmares of northeastern Congo. Yet they are not so far removed from the atrocities perpetrated there. Rape is a crime of the war they are fueling with their greed.
Today's conflict profiteers are not the first to sponsor a campaign to ransack, rape, pillage and plunder in the Congo. A century ago, Belgium's King Leopold II amassed a fabulous fortune this way. During the monarch's genocidal reign of terror, when villagers couldn't meet his impossibly high quotas harvesting rubber or mining ore, their hands were amputated and women were taken as slaves. By the time he was finished, an estimated 10 million Congolese, half the population, were dead.
Kinshasa's policy-makers, who serve in a government with four vice presidents in a misguided attempt to appease various factions, now claim a new political beginning after the so-called peace accord last year. But there is a "huge and dangerous gap" between what is happening in Kinshasa and what is going on in the northeast, says Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general. "In Kinshasa there is talk of peace and political progress, of regional harmony and democratic elections. But while the newly appointed members of government are wrangling for power and privilege in Kinshasa, in the Kivus and Ituri people are confronted daily with death, plunder and carnage. Mutilations and massacres continue. Rape of women and girls has become a standard tactic of warfare. It is absolutely outrageous that many of the senior members of the government and the political parties they represent are closely linked to the armed groups who are committing these abuses."
At the time of King Leopold's predatory rule, an international Congo reform movement was formed with the support of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad. It was Conrad who described what was being done as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." He would recognize what is happening now.
For the sake of 6-year-old Shashir and tens of thousands of girls and women who have been infected with HIV/AIDS, forcibly impregnated or so badly damaged internally they will never be able to have children, and who are so psychologically traumatized they may never recover, we can only hope that a similarly prominent group of today's social commentators will find its conscience and its voice soon.
This article appeared in the March 8, 2004 edition of The Nation.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
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We are making enormous strides in DR Congo, but our work is far from done. The women are filled with hope that you will help them continue to rebuild their lives. You're not only changing the course of one woman's life – you're support and generosity improves entire villages and communities!
In the last two years, we have expanded our program to reach remote villages and have now served over 24,000 women and 113,756 family and community members since our start. Women for Women International program in DR Congo is working:
88% report having improvement in personal and family health
86% report having improved their economic situation
88% of women expressed increased self-confidence
83% report having a greater knowledge of their rights
88% expressed being more active in their community
87% report being more active in family decision making.
It is only $27/month to change the life of a Congolese sister!
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$10=monthly cash for sponsored sister
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Friday, June 12, 2009
A Congo Journey by Makeda Crane
Her father taught his students to ‘value, study and honor their collective history,’ and his daughter to follow her heart. That legacy took the author on a journey to the Congo, where six million have died without shocking western sensibilities. ‘I vowed that when I returned home I would talk and write about the Congo in as many public forums as possible. To advocate for the Congolese, I must teach friends, family and others that the deaths of millions is a global issue that cannot be ignored.’
‘How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?’
On the weekend after Thanksgiving, I went home to Brooklyn, N.Y., to visit my father - the man whose height and stature always felt like a wall of protection between me and the world. As I sat beside his hospital bed in these last few months of his life, I had watched the body of this once robust, 6-foot-2, 240-pound man slowly transform into a wilted flower.
Now he was down to about 130 pounds. I whispered in his ear, ‘Daddy, do you remember me telling you that I’m going to the Congo’? He nodded back, but I wasn’t sure if it was a mere nod of recognition or true comprehension.
My personal connection to the Congo had been forged by my father, Ernest Crane. Born and raised in Harlem, he would often say, ‘I feel like a walking history book,’ as he recalled the important moments he participated in and lived through: Jim Crow, the March on Washington, Vietnam, Watergate. He often credited ‘Mama Lilla,’ his grandmother, with giving him a love of history. She would tell him bedtime stories of her parent’s lives as slaves - this was the root of his interest in his African ancestors.
It is no wonder that he was a lifelong student of liberation movements in America and abroad, and an avid reader of African history. Later, as a professor of psychology and African-American history, he taught students to value, study and honor their collective history.
‘How can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’
I had never been to the Congo but had been transplanted there by my father’s accounts of its history. He spoke of the Congo as a beautiful, lush country that had been sought after, first by Portugal and Belgium, then by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. I recall him saying, ‘The Congo is one of the most underreported massacres in history, how can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’ He spoke of the courage of Patrice Lumumba, a personal hero of his, who stood up against Belgian colonial rule.
I got closer to the Congo after watching a news program on which a guest spoke about the plight of the Congolese people. Later, flipping through the channels on my TV, I accidentally turned to a program about the systematic rape of women in Eastern Congo. I found myself drawn to stories about the area, and even though these were coincidences, there were too many for me to ignore the call.
I felt compelled to act and battled with myself about how - and if - I could make a difference from thousands of miles away. It was increasingly difficult to continue living the awful cliche of the sympathizing American who talks about the world’s suffering over a chai latte, but goes home and does nothing.
‘As I met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop.’
Instinctively, I realized the hidden message in my father’s words: ‘Makeda, always follow your heart.’ It was his love of freedom and dignity that compelled me to ask 150 people for $33 so I could go to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, as an independent journalist through Friends of the Congo, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization.
My father passed away on Jan. 3, and two days later, I left for the Congo. As I crossed the border into Goma and met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop, as if I were on a roller coaster that had just made a sharp plunge. The nearly 6 million people who had died in the 12 years of conflict seemed to loom over the dusty streets of Goma and its people.
At Goma’s main hospital, I looked into the pupils of a woman who represented the hundreds of thousands of women who had been systematically raped by foreign troops and Congolese militiamen; I sought evidence that she still had breath in her body. I felt a bond with her that surpassed sympathy; I knew her struggle was my own.
I listened like an empty vessel to a Congolese trader of coltan (a mineral vital to cell phones and other electronics) say, ‘The voice of a poor man doesn’t have any importance.’ He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits, and I wondered: How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?
At refugee camps, I witnessed the inadequate food rations dispensed to the refugees, while in the distance were vast green forests. When I asked children whose villages had been destroyed in the conflict how long they had been in the camps, many couldn’t recall living anywhere else.
‘He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits.’
As I walked through the last refugee camp on the line of conflict between Rwandan troops and Congolese rebels, I again felt the uneasiness that had accompanied my first steps onto Congo soil. I pulled out my father’s picture and looked at his smile, which assured me that I was protected.
Someone once told me: ‘People rarely take risks because they want to, but they take a leap of faith because of the persistent yearning that can only be resolved through action.’ I knew this trip was the start of an intimate relationship with the Congo.
Paying the highest tribute to my father, I vowed that when I returned home I would talk and write about the Congo in as many public forums as possible. To advocate for the Congolese, I must teach friends, family and others that the deaths of millions is a global issue that cannot be ignored. And people must be told that the root cause of the conflict is not ethnic division between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, but control of the Congo’s natural resources.
I will continue to act on behalf of those who have been silenced, grabbing the torch that was given to me, and keeping my father’s legacy in front of me as a guide in creating my own.
—
Makeda Crane, who works in The Baltimore Sun’s editorial department, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She plans to pursue a law degree, specializing in human rights and international advocacy issues.
Source: blackagendareport.com
This article originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun 25 February, 2009
.
‘How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?’
On the weekend after Thanksgiving, I went home to Brooklyn, N.Y., to visit my father - the man whose height and stature always felt like a wall of protection between me and the world. As I sat beside his hospital bed in these last few months of his life, I had watched the body of this once robust, 6-foot-2, 240-pound man slowly transform into a wilted flower.
Now he was down to about 130 pounds. I whispered in his ear, ‘Daddy, do you remember me telling you that I’m going to the Congo’? He nodded back, but I wasn’t sure if it was a mere nod of recognition or true comprehension.
My personal connection to the Congo had been forged by my father, Ernest Crane. Born and raised in Harlem, he would often say, ‘I feel like a walking history book,’ as he recalled the important moments he participated in and lived through: Jim Crow, the March on Washington, Vietnam, Watergate. He often credited ‘Mama Lilla,’ his grandmother, with giving him a love of history. She would tell him bedtime stories of her parent’s lives as slaves - this was the root of his interest in his African ancestors.
It is no wonder that he was a lifelong student of liberation movements in America and abroad, and an avid reader of African history. Later, as a professor of psychology and African-American history, he taught students to value, study and honor their collective history.
‘How can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’
I had never been to the Congo but had been transplanted there by my father’s accounts of its history. He spoke of the Congo as a beautiful, lush country that had been sought after, first by Portugal and Belgium, then by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. I recall him saying, ‘The Congo is one of the most underreported massacres in history, how can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’ He spoke of the courage of Patrice Lumumba, a personal hero of his, who stood up against Belgian colonial rule.
I got closer to the Congo after watching a news program on which a guest spoke about the plight of the Congolese people. Later, flipping through the channels on my TV, I accidentally turned to a program about the systematic rape of women in Eastern Congo. I found myself drawn to stories about the area, and even though these were coincidences, there were too many for me to ignore the call.
I felt compelled to act and battled with myself about how - and if - I could make a difference from thousands of miles away. It was increasingly difficult to continue living the awful cliche of the sympathizing American who talks about the world’s suffering over a chai latte, but goes home and does nothing.
‘As I met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop.’
Instinctively, I realized the hidden message in my father’s words: ‘Makeda, always follow your heart.’ It was his love of freedom and dignity that compelled me to ask 150 people for $33 so I could go to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, as an independent journalist through Friends of the Congo, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization.
My father passed away on Jan. 3, and two days later, I left for the Congo. As I crossed the border into Goma and met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop, as if I were on a roller coaster that had just made a sharp plunge. The nearly 6 million people who had died in the 12 years of conflict seemed to loom over the dusty streets of Goma and its people.
At Goma’s main hospital, I looked into the pupils of a woman who represented the hundreds of thousands of women who had been systematically raped by foreign troops and Congolese militiamen; I sought evidence that she still had breath in her body. I felt a bond with her that surpassed sympathy; I knew her struggle was my own.
I listened like an empty vessel to a Congolese trader of coltan (a mineral vital to cell phones and other electronics) say, ‘The voice of a poor man doesn’t have any importance.’ He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits, and I wondered: How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?
At refugee camps, I witnessed the inadequate food rations dispensed to the refugees, while in the distance were vast green forests. When I asked children whose villages had been destroyed in the conflict how long they had been in the camps, many couldn’t recall living anywhere else.
‘He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits.’
As I walked through the last refugee camp on the line of conflict between Rwandan troops and Congolese rebels, I again felt the uneasiness that had accompanied my first steps onto Congo soil. I pulled out my father’s picture and looked at his smile, which assured me that I was protected.
Someone once told me: ‘People rarely take risks because they want to, but they take a leap of faith because of the persistent yearning that can only be resolved through action.’ I knew this trip was the start of an intimate relationship with the Congo.
Paying the highest tribute to my father, I vowed that when I returned home I would talk and write about the Congo in as many public forums as possible. To advocate for the Congolese, I must teach friends, family and others that the deaths of millions is a global issue that cannot be ignored. And people must be told that the root cause of the conflict is not ethnic division between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, but control of the Congo’s natural resources.
I will continue to act on behalf of those who have been silenced, grabbing the torch that was given to me, and keeping my father’s legacy in front of me as a guide in creating my own.
—
Makeda Crane, who works in The Baltimore Sun’s editorial department, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She plans to pursue a law degree, specializing in human rights and international advocacy issues.
Source: blackagendareport.com
This article originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun 25 February, 2009
.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Titus 3:14
For our people should not live unproductive lives.
They must learn to do good by helping others who have urgent needs.
THE CONGO NEEDS YOUR HELP TODAY!!!
DONATE NOW!
They must learn to do good by helping others who have urgent needs.
THE CONGO NEEDS YOUR HELP TODAY!!!
DONATE NOW!
Monday, May 18, 2009
War on women in Congo=FEMICIDE
By Eve Ensler
Special to CNN
Editor's note: Eve Ensler is the playwright of "The Vagina Monologues" and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. V-Day has funded over 10,000 community-based anti-violence programs and launched safe houses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. This commentary was adapted from remarks Ensler made Wednesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs and the Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy and Global Women's Issues.
Playwright Eve Ensler says conflict in Congo is taking a terrible toll on women and girls.
(CNN) -- I write today on behalf of countless V-Day activists worldwide, and in solidarity with my many Congolese sisters and brothers who demand justice and an end to rape and war.
It is my hope that these words and those of others will break the silence and break open a sea of action to move Congolese women toward peace, safety and freedom.
My play, "The Vagina Monologues," opened my eyes to the world inside this world. Everywhere I traveled with it scores of women lined up to tell me of their rapes, incest, beatings, mutilations. It was because of this that over 11 years ago we launched V-Day, a worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls.
The movement has spread like wildfire to 130 countries, raising $70 million. I have visited and revisited the rape mines of the world, from defined war zones like Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti to the domestic battlegrounds in colleges and communities throughout North America, Europe and the world. My in-box -- and heart -- have been jammed with stories every hour of every day for over a decade.
Nothing I have heard or seen compares with what is going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where corporate greed, fueled by capitalist consumption, and the rape of women have merged into a single nightmare. Femicide, the systematic and planned destruction of the female population, is being used as a tactic of war to clear villages, pillage mines and destroy the fabric of Congolese society.
In 12 years, there have been 6 million dead men and women in Congo and 1.4 million people displaced. Hundreds and thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured. Babies as young as 6 months, women as old as 80, their insides torn apart. What I witnessed in Congo has shattered and changed me forever. I will never be the same. None of us should ever be the same.
I think of Beatrice, shot in her vagina, who now has tubes instead of organs. Honorata, raped by gangs as she was tied upside down to a wheel. Noella, who is my heart -- an 8-year-old girl who was held for 2 weeks as groups of grown men raped her over and over. Now she has a fistula, causing her to urinate and defecate on herself. Now she lives in humiliation.
I was in Bosnia during the war in 1994 when it was discovered there were rape camps where white women were being raped. Within two years there was adequate intervention. Yet, in Congo, femicide has continued for 12 years. Why? Is it that coltan, the mineral that keeps our cell phones and computers in play, is more important than Congolese girls?
Is it flat-out racism, the world's utter indifference and disregard for black people and black women in particular? Is it simply that the UN and most governments are run by men who have never known what it feels like to be raped?
What is happening in Congo is the most brutal and rampant violence toward women in the world. If it continues to go unchecked, if there continues to be complete impunity, it sets a precedent, it expands the boundaries of what is permissible to do to women's bodies in the name of exploitation and greed everywhere. It's cheap warfare.
The women in Congo are some of the most resilient women in the world. They need our protection and support. Western governments, like the United States, should fund a training program for female Congolese police officers.
They should address our role in plundering minerals and demand that companies trace the routes of these minerals. Make sure they are making and selling rape-free-products. Supply funds for women's medical and psychological care and seed their economic empowerment. Put pressure on Rwanda, Congo, Uganda and other countries in the Great Lakes region to sit down with all the militias involved in this conflict to find a political solution.
Military solutions are no longer an option and will only bring about more rape. Most of all, we must support the women. Because women are at the center of this horror, they must be at the center of the solutions and peace negotiations. Women are the future of Congo. They are its greatest resource.
Sadly, we are not the first to testify about these atrocities in Congo. I stand in a line of many who have described this horror. Still, in Eastern Congo, 1,100 women a month are raped, according to the United Nations' most recent report. What will the United States government, what will all of you reading this, do to stop it?
Let Congo be the place where we ended femicide, the trend that is madly eviscerating this planet -- from the floggings in Pakistan, the new rape laws in Afghanistan, the ongoing rapes in Haiti, Darfur, Zimbabwe, the daily battering, incest, harassing, trafficking, enslaving, genital cutting and honor killing. Let Congo be the place where women were finally cherished and life affirmed, where the humiliation and subjugation ended, where women took their rightful agency over their bodies and land.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eve Ensler.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/18/ensler.congo/index.html
Special to CNN
Editor's note: Eve Ensler is the playwright of "The Vagina Monologues" and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. V-Day has funded over 10,000 community-based anti-violence programs and launched safe houses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. This commentary was adapted from remarks Ensler made Wednesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs and the Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy and Global Women's Issues.
Playwright Eve Ensler says conflict in Congo is taking a terrible toll on women and girls.
(CNN) -- I write today on behalf of countless V-Day activists worldwide, and in solidarity with my many Congolese sisters and brothers who demand justice and an end to rape and war.
It is my hope that these words and those of others will break the silence and break open a sea of action to move Congolese women toward peace, safety and freedom.
My play, "The Vagina Monologues," opened my eyes to the world inside this world. Everywhere I traveled with it scores of women lined up to tell me of their rapes, incest, beatings, mutilations. It was because of this that over 11 years ago we launched V-Day, a worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls.
The movement has spread like wildfire to 130 countries, raising $70 million. I have visited and revisited the rape mines of the world, from defined war zones like Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti to the domestic battlegrounds in colleges and communities throughout North America, Europe and the world. My in-box -- and heart -- have been jammed with stories every hour of every day for over a decade.
Nothing I have heard or seen compares with what is going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where corporate greed, fueled by capitalist consumption, and the rape of women have merged into a single nightmare. Femicide, the systematic and planned destruction of the female population, is being used as a tactic of war to clear villages, pillage mines and destroy the fabric of Congolese society.
In 12 years, there have been 6 million dead men and women in Congo and 1.4 million people displaced. Hundreds and thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured. Babies as young as 6 months, women as old as 80, their insides torn apart. What I witnessed in Congo has shattered and changed me forever. I will never be the same. None of us should ever be the same.
I think of Beatrice, shot in her vagina, who now has tubes instead of organs. Honorata, raped by gangs as she was tied upside down to a wheel. Noella, who is my heart -- an 8-year-old girl who was held for 2 weeks as groups of grown men raped her over and over. Now she has a fistula, causing her to urinate and defecate on herself. Now she lives in humiliation.
I was in Bosnia during the war in 1994 when it was discovered there were rape camps where white women were being raped. Within two years there was adequate intervention. Yet, in Congo, femicide has continued for 12 years. Why? Is it that coltan, the mineral that keeps our cell phones and computers in play, is more important than Congolese girls?
Is it flat-out racism, the world's utter indifference and disregard for black people and black women in particular? Is it simply that the UN and most governments are run by men who have never known what it feels like to be raped?
What is happening in Congo is the most brutal and rampant violence toward women in the world. If it continues to go unchecked, if there continues to be complete impunity, it sets a precedent, it expands the boundaries of what is permissible to do to women's bodies in the name of exploitation and greed everywhere. It's cheap warfare.
The women in Congo are some of the most resilient women in the world. They need our protection and support. Western governments, like the United States, should fund a training program for female Congolese police officers.
They should address our role in plundering minerals and demand that companies trace the routes of these minerals. Make sure they are making and selling rape-free-products. Supply funds for women's medical and psychological care and seed their economic empowerment. Put pressure on Rwanda, Congo, Uganda and other countries in the Great Lakes region to sit down with all the militias involved in this conflict to find a political solution.
Military solutions are no longer an option and will only bring about more rape. Most of all, we must support the women. Because women are at the center of this horror, they must be at the center of the solutions and peace negotiations. Women are the future of Congo. They are its greatest resource.
Sadly, we are not the first to testify about these atrocities in Congo. I stand in a line of many who have described this horror. Still, in Eastern Congo, 1,100 women a month are raped, according to the United Nations' most recent report. What will the United States government, what will all of you reading this, do to stop it?
Let Congo be the place where we ended femicide, the trend that is madly eviscerating this planet -- from the floggings in Pakistan, the new rape laws in Afghanistan, the ongoing rapes in Haiti, Darfur, Zimbabwe, the daily battering, incest, harassing, trafficking, enslaving, genital cutting and honor killing. Let Congo be the place where women were finally cherished and life affirmed, where the humiliation and subjugation ended, where women took their rightful agency over their bodies and land.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eve Ensler.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/18/ensler.congo/index.html
Friday, April 17, 2009
Nicole Richie Speaks Out Against Congo-Mined Minerals
FIRST PUBLISHED: April 16, 2009 2:41 PM EDT
LAST UPDATED: April 16, 2009 3:35 PM EDT
LOS ANGELES, Calif. --
Nicole Richie has joined the likes of Ben Affleck, Mia Farrow and Emile Hirsch by speaking out about the situation in the African nation of Congo.
The celebutante-turned-celebumom posted a video on her blog, hoping to raise awareness about the sexual crimes being committed in the warring country.
“I’m about to tell you a true story about a place where babies and grandmothers are being raped on a daily basis and the reason they are being raped is directly connected to the purchases of our cell phones, of our laptops and of our iPods,” Nicole said in the clip.
With longtime pal John Prendergast from The Enough Project, and Kimberly Pinkson, from the EcoMom Alliance, the trio explain that minerals that are found in the Congo are used in the making of electronic products regularly purchased by consumers. They go about naming several products and companies that use the minerals, which Prendergast points out do not have to be bought in Congo, but can be mined in other countries not under crisis.
Nicole goes on to note that rape is being used as a control mechanism, but does not single out the group involved in the crimes.
“The No. 1 weapon out there — it’s not guns, it’s not knives, it is rape,” she says. “They are raping these women and not only is it — I mean it’s not just rape, these women are being raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children… I mean, this stuff is really inhumane. This is the worst thing that I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Nicole and her pals suggest people avoid buying products that include minerals from countries engaged in conflict.
“We are not as ignorant as people think we are. We simply don’t know. And it’s not our fault,” she says. “It is so easy to be just completely distracted and I really am optimistic that if I bring it to my peers attention that they are gonna wanna do the right thing.”
Copyright 2009 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
LAST UPDATED: April 16, 2009 3:35 PM EDT
LOS ANGELES, Calif. --
Nicole Richie has joined the likes of Ben Affleck, Mia Farrow and Emile Hirsch by speaking out about the situation in the African nation of Congo.
The celebutante-turned-celebumom posted a video on her blog, hoping to raise awareness about the sexual crimes being committed in the warring country.
“I’m about to tell you a true story about a place where babies and grandmothers are being raped on a daily basis and the reason they are being raped is directly connected to the purchases of our cell phones, of our laptops and of our iPods,” Nicole said in the clip.
With longtime pal John Prendergast from The Enough Project, and Kimberly Pinkson, from the EcoMom Alliance, the trio explain that minerals that are found in the Congo are used in the making of electronic products regularly purchased by consumers. They go about naming several products and companies that use the minerals, which Prendergast points out do not have to be bought in Congo, but can be mined in other countries not under crisis.
Nicole goes on to note that rape is being used as a control mechanism, but does not single out the group involved in the crimes.
“The No. 1 weapon out there — it’s not guns, it’s not knives, it is rape,” she says. “They are raping these women and not only is it — I mean it’s not just rape, these women are being raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children… I mean, this stuff is really inhumane. This is the worst thing that I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Nicole and her pals suggest people avoid buying products that include minerals from countries engaged in conflict.
“We are not as ignorant as people think we are. We simply don’t know. And it’s not our fault,” she says. “It is so easy to be just completely distracted and I really am optimistic that if I bring it to my peers attention that they are gonna wanna do the right thing.”
Copyright 2009 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Sexual violence in Congo provides the backdrop for play 'Ruined'
NEW YORK — The photos in the lobby are a sobering reminder of the real people behind Lynn Nottage's "Ruined," a gripping play focused on Congo, where horrific rape Is Routinely Used As A Weapon In A Seemingly Endless War.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The women look at the camera in stark black and white, some of them stoic, some fighting to hold back tears. Some of them trudged long distances to share their stories of sexual violence with Nottage.
More than five million people have been killed in Congo since 1994 and untold thousands of women have been violated so aggressively, sometimes with bayonets, that their vaginal walls are ripped, leaving them "ruined" - too damaged to work or have children, and frequently shunned by their families.
The Congolese refugees who spoke with her during her visit to northern Uganda, just wanted someone to listen to them, Nottage said five years later, over coffee at a cafe in her Brooklyn neighbourhood.
"A lot of the women felt they weren't being heard," said Nottage. "I explained to them, 'I'm a storyteller, I can only give you an ear.' No one had ever listened to their stories from beginning to end."
A tribal chief's daughter shared her astonishment that a woman of her station could be raped by four soldiers. The fair-skinned daughter of a Belgian immigrant described how she couldn't get aid groups to believe what she had been through. Another woman broke off to sob for minutes straight.
Nottage was inspired by Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children," which tells the story of woman who profits off war but loses all her children in the process.
Nottage's protagonist is Mama Nadi - an opportunistic Congolese bar-owner who survives by not picking sides in a region with many sides to choose from, protecting a small group of women but still implicated by the moral choices she makes.
Nottage refuses to judge her.
"She's a creature of the environment of the war. Is she right? Is she wrong?," she asks and leaves the question dangling.
The play is not journalism. Nottage drew on her interviews - she borrowed Mama Nadi's name, for instance, from one woman with whom she spoke - but she invented her narrative, one that is brutal, but also leavened by optimism and lively music. The history of the wars is kept muddy; the militia men are mostly undifferentiated. The women, who survive largely by prostitution, are the focus.
The play, which had its world premiere last year at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, opened in February to favourable reviews off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage I and has been extended for a third time to run through May 3.
It already has been nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for best off-Broadway play of the season and it has received strong buzz as a possible finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The winner will be announced April 20.
Congo's dramatic spike in rape has been fuelled by rival militias, tribal conflicts and a national army described as one of the most badly-disciplined and corrupt in Africa.
No one is really sure how many Congolese women have been raped; estimates range from 60,000 to 400,000, said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a Congo expert with Human Rights Watch.
"There's no question that this is widespread," she said. "It is used as a weapon of war. It's not just bored soldiers with nothing better to do."
Van Woudenberg applauded the play for getting the details right: the way armed groups pretend they are fighting for the people; the survival tactic of trying to remain on friendly terms with everyone; militias' use of women as slaves, both sexually, and as cooks and maids. She hopes its audience will come out of the theatre wanting to learn more.
Nottage's husband, Tony Gerber, a filmmaker, took the photos during the Uganda trip. He has since travelled to Congo twice to make documentaries for National Geographic.
Gerber explained the role his photos played in his wife's creative process.
"The eyes of the women in those photos followed her. She could go back to those photos, back to the pictures, as a way of checking in with reality," he explained, adding, however, that the characters in the play are fully her own.
Nottage worked hard to tell a full story. Though her subject is brutality, her characters laugh, sing, dance and tease each other. The play is full of music and joy, even as the cataclysm in Congo casts a broad shadow.
The play offers a hint of hope in its poignant conclusion, a note that has bothered some audience members who complain the play cries out for a harsher ending. Nottage loses her normally calm, even demeanour over such criticism.
"It enrages me . . . I'm not going to fuel that image of Africa. We're constantly being sold the hopelessness," she said.
The Congolese say, "'We have the ability to find the beauty; that's why we survive."'
Copyright © 2009 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The women look at the camera in stark black and white, some of them stoic, some fighting to hold back tears. Some of them trudged long distances to share their stories of sexual violence with Nottage.
More than five million people have been killed in Congo since 1994 and untold thousands of women have been violated so aggressively, sometimes with bayonets, that their vaginal walls are ripped, leaving them "ruined" - too damaged to work or have children, and frequently shunned by their families.
The Congolese refugees who spoke with her during her visit to northern Uganda, just wanted someone to listen to them, Nottage said five years later, over coffee at a cafe in her Brooklyn neighbourhood.
"A lot of the women felt they weren't being heard," said Nottage. "I explained to them, 'I'm a storyteller, I can only give you an ear.' No one had ever listened to their stories from beginning to end."
A tribal chief's daughter shared her astonishment that a woman of her station could be raped by four soldiers. The fair-skinned daughter of a Belgian immigrant described how she couldn't get aid groups to believe what she had been through. Another woman broke off to sob for minutes straight.
Nottage was inspired by Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children," which tells the story of woman who profits off war but loses all her children in the process.
Nottage's protagonist is Mama Nadi - an opportunistic Congolese bar-owner who survives by not picking sides in a region with many sides to choose from, protecting a small group of women but still implicated by the moral choices she makes.
Nottage refuses to judge her.
"She's a creature of the environment of the war. Is she right? Is she wrong?," she asks and leaves the question dangling.
The play is not journalism. Nottage drew on her interviews - she borrowed Mama Nadi's name, for instance, from one woman with whom she spoke - but she invented her narrative, one that is brutal, but also leavened by optimism and lively music. The history of the wars is kept muddy; the militia men are mostly undifferentiated. The women, who survive largely by prostitution, are the focus.
The play, which had its world premiere last year at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, opened in February to favourable reviews off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage I and has been extended for a third time to run through May 3.
It already has been nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for best off-Broadway play of the season and it has received strong buzz as a possible finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The winner will be announced April 20.
Congo's dramatic spike in rape has been fuelled by rival militias, tribal conflicts and a national army described as one of the most badly-disciplined and corrupt in Africa.
No one is really sure how many Congolese women have been raped; estimates range from 60,000 to 400,000, said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a Congo expert with Human Rights Watch.
"There's no question that this is widespread," she said. "It is used as a weapon of war. It's not just bored soldiers with nothing better to do."
Van Woudenberg applauded the play for getting the details right: the way armed groups pretend they are fighting for the people; the survival tactic of trying to remain on friendly terms with everyone; militias' use of women as slaves, both sexually, and as cooks and maids. She hopes its audience will come out of the theatre wanting to learn more.
Nottage's husband, Tony Gerber, a filmmaker, took the photos during the Uganda trip. He has since travelled to Congo twice to make documentaries for National Geographic.
Gerber explained the role his photos played in his wife's creative process.
"The eyes of the women in those photos followed her. She could go back to those photos, back to the pictures, as a way of checking in with reality," he explained, adding, however, that the characters in the play are fully her own.
Nottage worked hard to tell a full story. Though her subject is brutality, her characters laugh, sing, dance and tease each other. The play is full of music and joy, even as the cataclysm in Congo casts a broad shadow.
The play offers a hint of hope in its poignant conclusion, a note that has bothered some audience members who complain the play cries out for a harsher ending. Nottage loses her normally calm, even demeanour over such criticism.
"It enrages me . . . I'm not going to fuel that image of Africa. We're constantly being sold the hopelessness," she said.
The Congolese say, "'We have the ability to find the beauty; that's why we survive."'
Copyright © 2009 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Congo Violence Fueled by Common Material in Cell Phones, Laptops...
By Rima Abdelkader
For many, one's cell phone has become a fifth limb. But, for Congolese lawyer Joseph Mbangu, it's more a case of life and death.
The New York-based lawyer is trying to alert cell phone and laptop users that a key ingredient in their devices has been at the center of vicious struggles over natural resources between rebel and government forces in the eastern Congo.
"So many people have to die for us to be innocent users over here," said Mbangu, who is also the outreach coordinator for the documentary, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," recently aired on HBO.
Congolese miners have been killed, and women raped during the 11-year war over mineral deposits in the eastern Congo, Mbangu said. One of the deposits is a natural metallic ore, columbite-tantalite, or coltan, that, when refined, stores an electric charge in a capacitor used in common electronic devices.
The Congo region, which contains as much as 80 percent of the world's coltan reserves, yielded 300 tons and $5.42 million last year, up 50 percent over 2007, a recent U.N. Security Council report said.
There is some dispute over the percentage. The independent group of advisors put the figure as high as 80 percent, but Sasha Leshnev, a Washington-based researcher who is an expert on minerals in the DRC, puts it at 15 percent. For the Congolese caught in the conflict, it hardly matters.
"For women to be raped and mutilated so that some rogue army could sell it (coltan) and enslave people and have forced labor is really outrageous," Mbangu said.
The exploitation of mineral resources is one of several factors that is fueling the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi.
DRC's U.N. ambassador Faida Mitifu, speaking recently in New York during a panel discussion on media coverage of sexual violence against Congolese women, said the exploitation of mineral resources is the driving force behind the conflict. The history of exploitation and conflict dates back to the Congo's colonial history with Belgium, she said.
But she said there's renewed hope for change.
After a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last year on sexual violence and conflict in the Congo, Sen. Sam Brownback (R. - Kan) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D. - Ill) introduced a bill last May that would prohibit the sale of certain products that contain coltan or cassiterite mined in the DRC.
Although the legislation stalled, Durbin will reintroduce the bill after Easter recess, his press secretary, Max Gleischman said.
The U.N. Security Council also is trying to bring attention to the issue. "Exporters and consumers of Congolese mineral products should step up their due diligence efforts by publicly disclosing evidence that would demonstrate that they are not knowingly purchasing tainted minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo," the 2008 UN report said.
To step up the pressure, the U.N. Sanctions Committee in February also listed two firms that operate in the Congo, the Bakavu Aviation Transport and the Business Air Services, that are allegedly involved in the illegal exporting of coltan and other natural resources from the DRC.
Mbangu, the Congolese attorney, called on electronics companies to come up with alternative minerals to replace coltan or to find the mineral elsewhere.
Leshnev, the expert on minerals in the DRC, agreed. He joined with 32 organizations, including The Enough Project, in a letter campaign asking CEOs of major electronic companies to change the way metals are purchased.
"If the major electronic companies would have independent supply chain audits for their metals as well as be able to trace their metals back to the mine of origin, then the average American consumer would know that their product would be conflict free," said Leshnev.
Tama McWhinney, a spokeswoman for Motorola, said the cell phone manufacturer is "concerned about what is happening with coltan in the Congo" and has asked vendors to "verify in writing that the coltan that is used" in their protects is not from the DRC.
With more than four billion cell phone subscribers worldwide, up from one billion six years ago, even Mbangu admitted it's very difficult to navigate in the 21st century without a cell phone or a laptop. He occasionally uses both devices but it hasn't stopped his campaign to protect innocent people in the Congo.
It's difficult to enforce the same kind of sanctions against those who were involved in the illegal mining of diamonds, Mbangu said. Unlike diamonds, coltan is not a luxury, and it is not as visible as a diamond necklace, he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nycity-news-service/congo-violence-fueled-by_b_184192.html
For many, one's cell phone has become a fifth limb. But, for Congolese lawyer Joseph Mbangu, it's more a case of life and death.
The New York-based lawyer is trying to alert cell phone and laptop users that a key ingredient in their devices has been at the center of vicious struggles over natural resources between rebel and government forces in the eastern Congo.
"So many people have to die for us to be innocent users over here," said Mbangu, who is also the outreach coordinator for the documentary, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," recently aired on HBO.
Congolese miners have been killed, and women raped during the 11-year war over mineral deposits in the eastern Congo, Mbangu said. One of the deposits is a natural metallic ore, columbite-tantalite, or coltan, that, when refined, stores an electric charge in a capacitor used in common electronic devices.
The Congo region, which contains as much as 80 percent of the world's coltan reserves, yielded 300 tons and $5.42 million last year, up 50 percent over 2007, a recent U.N. Security Council report said.
There is some dispute over the percentage. The independent group of advisors put the figure as high as 80 percent, but Sasha Leshnev, a Washington-based researcher who is an expert on minerals in the DRC, puts it at 15 percent. For the Congolese caught in the conflict, it hardly matters.
"For women to be raped and mutilated so that some rogue army could sell it (coltan) and enslave people and have forced labor is really outrageous," Mbangu said.
The exploitation of mineral resources is one of several factors that is fueling the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi.
DRC's U.N. ambassador Faida Mitifu, speaking recently in New York during a panel discussion on media coverage of sexual violence against Congolese women, said the exploitation of mineral resources is the driving force behind the conflict. The history of exploitation and conflict dates back to the Congo's colonial history with Belgium, she said.
But she said there's renewed hope for change.
After a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last year on sexual violence and conflict in the Congo, Sen. Sam Brownback (R. - Kan) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D. - Ill) introduced a bill last May that would prohibit the sale of certain products that contain coltan or cassiterite mined in the DRC.
Although the legislation stalled, Durbin will reintroduce the bill after Easter recess, his press secretary, Max Gleischman said.
The U.N. Security Council also is trying to bring attention to the issue. "Exporters and consumers of Congolese mineral products should step up their due diligence efforts by publicly disclosing evidence that would demonstrate that they are not knowingly purchasing tainted minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo," the 2008 UN report said.
To step up the pressure, the U.N. Sanctions Committee in February also listed two firms that operate in the Congo, the Bakavu Aviation Transport and the Business Air Services, that are allegedly involved in the illegal exporting of coltan and other natural resources from the DRC.
Mbangu, the Congolese attorney, called on electronics companies to come up with alternative minerals to replace coltan or to find the mineral elsewhere.
Leshnev, the expert on minerals in the DRC, agreed. He joined with 32 organizations, including The Enough Project, in a letter campaign asking CEOs of major electronic companies to change the way metals are purchased.
"If the major electronic companies would have independent supply chain audits for their metals as well as be able to trace their metals back to the mine of origin, then the average American consumer would know that their product would be conflict free," said Leshnev.
Tama McWhinney, a spokeswoman for Motorola, said the cell phone manufacturer is "concerned about what is happening with coltan in the Congo" and has asked vendors to "verify in writing that the coltan that is used" in their protects is not from the DRC.
With more than four billion cell phone subscribers worldwide, up from one billion six years ago, even Mbangu admitted it's very difficult to navigate in the 21st century without a cell phone or a laptop. He occasionally uses both devices but it hasn't stopped his campaign to protect innocent people in the Congo.
It's difficult to enforce the same kind of sanctions against those who were involved in the illegal mining of diamonds, Mbangu said. Unlike diamonds, coltan is not a luxury, and it is not as visible as a diamond necklace, he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nycity-news-service/congo-violence-fueled-by_b_184192.html
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Our Prayer for the Women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Dear Lord,
We come to you today with our head bowed and our heart heavy because of the violent attacks happening to our sisters in the Congo. We are pleading their cause to an ungodly nation and asking that you deliver them from deceitful and unjust men. (Psalm 43:1)
Lord, we ask that you heal their bodies and souls and let them know that this is not their fault. Please sow up what the devil has ripped apart and let them find strength in you. Be not far from them, O Lord, because you are their strength, hasten to help them! (Psalm 22:19) Please remind them on a daily basis that you are a shield around them, their glory and the one who lifts their head up high. (Psalm 3:3)
Lord, we are laying this cause before you because your word says that you perform wonders that cannot be fathomed and miracles that cannot be counted. You have the power to set the lowly on high and lift those who mourn to safety. Please save these women from the swords in their bodies and from the clutches of the powerful. (Job 5:8-9, 11 & 15) We ask that you reveal your plan in these women's lives and give them a hope and a future that prospers their mind, body and soul! (Jeremiah 29:11)
Lord, we are also seeking your guidance as we do your work in this world. Please be a light to our path and a lamp to our feet as we take on this righteous cause so that we are at all times, honoring you, your word and your people. (Psalm 115:105) We pray for a heart of love, faith and hope so that we may save our sisters in the Congo.
We ask these blessings in Jesus's name, in expectation that it SHALL BE DONE to bring YOU all the glory Father! (John 14:12-14)
AMEN
Monday, March 16, 2009
Congo Women Fight Back!
Congo women fight back, speak out about rape
Victims shatter local taboos around talking about violence against civilians.
By Michelle Faul
updated 9:37 a.m. CT, Mon., March. 16, 2009
DOSHU, Congo - Zamuda Sikujuwa shuffles to a bench in the sunshine, pushes apart her thighs with a grimace of pain and pumps her fist up and down in a lewd-looking gesture to show how the militiamen shoved an automatic rifle inside her.
The brutish act tore apart her insides after seven of the men had taken turns raping her. She lost consciousness and wishes now that her life also had ended on that day.
The rebels from the Tutsi tribe had come demanding U.S. dollars. But when her husband could not even produce local currency, they put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. When her two children started crying, the rebels killed them too. Then they attacked Sikujuwa and left her for dead.
The 53-year-old still has difficulty walking after two operations. Yet she wants to tell the world her story, even though repeating it brings back the nightmares.
"It's hard, hard, hard," she says. "I'm alone in this world. My body is partly mended but I don't know if my heart will ever heal. ... I want this violence to stop. I don't want other women to have to suffer what I am suffering."
Rape has been used as a brutal weapon of war in Congo, where conflicts based on tribal lines have spawned dozens of armed groups amid back-to-back civil wars that drew in several African nations. More than 5 million people have died since 1994. Women have become even more vulnerable since a rebel advance at the end of last year drove a quarter-million people from their homes and fighting this year left another 100,000 others homeless, according to aid workers.
Now some of the women are fighting back the only way they know how — by talking about what happened.
Breaking taboos
A campaign spearheaded by the U.N. Children's Fund is working with local groups to break traditional taboos around talking about the violence. They're using radio stations broadcasting in local languages, and more activists are getting to remote areas.
"Many more victims are coming forward. We receive a lot of SMS text messages and cell phone calls from women who have been raped and need help," says campaign leader Esther Ntoto.
Five months ago, U.N. officials began bringing together women to tell their stories to rooms full of local officials, community leaders, even children. One sign of success is that more men than women have volunteered for training to encourage victims to come forward and their communities to confront the issues.
Video footage of the campaign Women Breaking the Silence shows officials startled by the atrocities recounted. A provincial minister interrupted to ask reporters not to film a woman's face. But she took the microphone to declare: "I am not ashamed to show my face and publish my identity. The shame lies with those who broke me open and with the authorities who failed to protect me.
"If you don't hear me, see me, you will not understand why it is so important that we fight this together."
That woman, Honorata Kizende, described how her life as a school teacher and the mother of seven children ended when she was kidnapped in 2001. She was held as a sex slave for 18 months and passed around from one Hutu fighter to another until she escaped. She is now a counselor and trains others to help survivors of sexual violence.
One of the difficulties is the "huge problem of impunity," said Mireille Kahatwa Amani, a lawyer working at an office at HEAL Africa Hospital opened a year ago by the Chicago-based American Bar Association.
"It's difficult to prosecute perpetrators because they can buy off the police or a judge. There's no guarantee of justice," she says.
Still, with funding from the U.S. State Department, lawyers have interviewed more than 250 victims and pursued more than 100 cases. In 11 months, they have received 30judgments with only two acquittals. Those found guilty have been punished with sentences of five to 20 years in jail, Kahatwa says.
Her big success this year was against a man who has been condemned to 20 years in jail for raping a 6-year-old neighbor and infecting her with the AIDS virus. Kahatwa says the judgment came just a month after the complaint was filed, a record.
Surgery helps some wounds
Kasongo Manyema takes small, careful steps, fearful of unwrapping the cloth tied like a baby's diaper to catch the blood, urine and feces that has been dribbling from her body for 2 1/2 years.
She was 19 then, when men in military uniform attacked her as she weeded her family's cassava field.
A U.N. helicopter has brought her to HEAL Africa Hospital in Goma, where reconstructive surgery could help her incontinence and the stench that follows her and thousands of other Congolese women suffering from fistulas.
Fistulas usually result from giving birth in poor conditions. In Congo, they are caused by violent rapes that tear apart the flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina.
Dr. Christophe Kinoma, one of only two surgeons who perform the reconstructive operations in east Congo, says there's a 50-50 chance that surgery can mend Manyema and others like her.
"Yesterday I did five fistula operations and we have more than 100 women waiting here and who knows how many out in the bush who never ever get to a hospital."
Kinoma says it has become the norm for armed men to use guns, knives and bayonets to rupture their victims' bodies. Sometimes they shoot bullets up women's vaginas. Victims often are rejected by their families, contract HIV, and are left to live in pain and shame.
In December, he operated on an 11-month-old baby raped by a 22-year-old neighbor. During one week in February, it was a 12-year-old girl who had been savagely raped by five soldiers. They stuffed a maize cob inside her.
Also treated last week was a 4-year-old whose mother sent her across the road to get something from a neighbor. She was kidnapped by soldiers and gang-raped.
"An American doctor who was here just burst into tears and collapsed. She couldn't believe what the soldiers had done to this child, just torn her body apart," he says.
Kinoma says he may be able to mend the physical damage, "but the psychological trauma never goes away for some." The hospital offers counseling but has no psychologists.
"The 11-month-old I operated on, every time she sees a man, including me, she starts screaming," he says.
The 4-year-old was infected with HIV, and they await results from a test on the 12-year-old. "If three, four, five soldiers rape you, you are almost assured of contracting AIDS," Kinoma says.
‘It’s like my brain is on fire’
The trauma that haunts these children and women also affects those who help them.
Hortense Tshomba, who has been counseling victims for three years, says she hopes to give them the courage to return to their homes. Many are rejected by husbands and fathers who say the attacks have left them "unclean."
"We try to counsel them as couples. For girls rejected by their parents, we try to intervene. Some families accept them back; others don't."
When counseling does not help, HEAL Africa offers lessons in sewing and handicrafts to teach them to survive financially. She says rejected women who don't get help often are forced from communities and become beggars.
"Sometimes I have nightmares," Tshomba says. "When I leave after hearing all these horror stories, really it's like my brain is on fire. I have to listen to some jazz to ease my soul."
But there are successes like 13-year-old Harriet, who came to HEAL Africa four years ago. Harriet's parents were killed by the rebels who attacked her and then burned down their home in Rutshuru, north of Goma. She now lives with a woman who counseled her at the hospital.
On this day, Harriet is so delighted she cannot stop grinning, a wide beam that's infectious in its joy. Her fingernails are black with dirt, but she is wearing lip gloss and eyeliner.
"Today, I got my results and I am top of my class," she announces, flaunting a report that shows she averaged 88.5 percent in math, French and English exams.
"When I came to HEAL Africa, I had never been to school. I was 9 years old. Now I'm beating students who have been to school all their lives," she says. "My teacher says I'm very intelligent, that I should go to school in the United States."
As for the future: "I think I want to be a doctor, so that I can help people the way these doctors helped me."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29719277/
Victims shatter local taboos around talking about violence against civilians.
By Michelle Faul
updated 9:37 a.m. CT, Mon., March. 16, 2009
DOSHU, Congo - Zamuda Sikujuwa shuffles to a bench in the sunshine, pushes apart her thighs with a grimace of pain and pumps her fist up and down in a lewd-looking gesture to show how the militiamen shoved an automatic rifle inside her.
The brutish act tore apart her insides after seven of the men had taken turns raping her. She lost consciousness and wishes now that her life also had ended on that day.
The rebels from the Tutsi tribe had come demanding U.S. dollars. But when her husband could not even produce local currency, they put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. When her two children started crying, the rebels killed them too. Then they attacked Sikujuwa and left her for dead.
The 53-year-old still has difficulty walking after two operations. Yet she wants to tell the world her story, even though repeating it brings back the nightmares.
"It's hard, hard, hard," she says. "I'm alone in this world. My body is partly mended but I don't know if my heart will ever heal. ... I want this violence to stop. I don't want other women to have to suffer what I am suffering."
Rape has been used as a brutal weapon of war in Congo, where conflicts based on tribal lines have spawned dozens of armed groups amid back-to-back civil wars that drew in several African nations. More than 5 million people have died since 1994. Women have become even more vulnerable since a rebel advance at the end of last year drove a quarter-million people from their homes and fighting this year left another 100,000 others homeless, according to aid workers.
Now some of the women are fighting back the only way they know how — by talking about what happened.
Breaking taboos
A campaign spearheaded by the U.N. Children's Fund is working with local groups to break traditional taboos around talking about the violence. They're using radio stations broadcasting in local languages, and more activists are getting to remote areas.
"Many more victims are coming forward. We receive a lot of SMS text messages and cell phone calls from women who have been raped and need help," says campaign leader Esther Ntoto.
Five months ago, U.N. officials began bringing together women to tell their stories to rooms full of local officials, community leaders, even children. One sign of success is that more men than women have volunteered for training to encourage victims to come forward and their communities to confront the issues.
Video footage of the campaign Women Breaking the Silence shows officials startled by the atrocities recounted. A provincial minister interrupted to ask reporters not to film a woman's face. But she took the microphone to declare: "I am not ashamed to show my face and publish my identity. The shame lies with those who broke me open and with the authorities who failed to protect me.
"If you don't hear me, see me, you will not understand why it is so important that we fight this together."
That woman, Honorata Kizende, described how her life as a school teacher and the mother of seven children ended when she was kidnapped in 2001. She was held as a sex slave for 18 months and passed around from one Hutu fighter to another until she escaped. She is now a counselor and trains others to help survivors of sexual violence.
One of the difficulties is the "huge problem of impunity," said Mireille Kahatwa Amani, a lawyer working at an office at HEAL Africa Hospital opened a year ago by the Chicago-based American Bar Association.
"It's difficult to prosecute perpetrators because they can buy off the police or a judge. There's no guarantee of justice," she says.
Still, with funding from the U.S. State Department, lawyers have interviewed more than 250 victims and pursued more than 100 cases. In 11 months, they have received 30judgments with only two acquittals. Those found guilty have been punished with sentences of five to 20 years in jail, Kahatwa says.
Her big success this year was against a man who has been condemned to 20 years in jail for raping a 6-year-old neighbor and infecting her with the AIDS virus. Kahatwa says the judgment came just a month after the complaint was filed, a record.
Surgery helps some wounds
Kasongo Manyema takes small, careful steps, fearful of unwrapping the cloth tied like a baby's diaper to catch the blood, urine and feces that has been dribbling from her body for 2 1/2 years.
She was 19 then, when men in military uniform attacked her as she weeded her family's cassava field.
A U.N. helicopter has brought her to HEAL Africa Hospital in Goma, where reconstructive surgery could help her incontinence and the stench that follows her and thousands of other Congolese women suffering from fistulas.
Fistulas usually result from giving birth in poor conditions. In Congo, they are caused by violent rapes that tear apart the flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina.
Dr. Christophe Kinoma, one of only two surgeons who perform the reconstructive operations in east Congo, says there's a 50-50 chance that surgery can mend Manyema and others like her.
"Yesterday I did five fistula operations and we have more than 100 women waiting here and who knows how many out in the bush who never ever get to a hospital."
Kinoma says it has become the norm for armed men to use guns, knives and bayonets to rupture their victims' bodies. Sometimes they shoot bullets up women's vaginas. Victims often are rejected by their families, contract HIV, and are left to live in pain and shame.
In December, he operated on an 11-month-old baby raped by a 22-year-old neighbor. During one week in February, it was a 12-year-old girl who had been savagely raped by five soldiers. They stuffed a maize cob inside her.
Also treated last week was a 4-year-old whose mother sent her across the road to get something from a neighbor. She was kidnapped by soldiers and gang-raped.
"An American doctor who was here just burst into tears and collapsed. She couldn't believe what the soldiers had done to this child, just torn her body apart," he says.
Kinoma says he may be able to mend the physical damage, "but the psychological trauma never goes away for some." The hospital offers counseling but has no psychologists.
"The 11-month-old I operated on, every time she sees a man, including me, she starts screaming," he says.
The 4-year-old was infected with HIV, and they await results from a test on the 12-year-old. "If three, four, five soldiers rape you, you are almost assured of contracting AIDS," Kinoma says.
‘It’s like my brain is on fire’
The trauma that haunts these children and women also affects those who help them.
Hortense Tshomba, who has been counseling victims for three years, says she hopes to give them the courage to return to their homes. Many are rejected by husbands and fathers who say the attacks have left them "unclean."
"We try to counsel them as couples. For girls rejected by their parents, we try to intervene. Some families accept them back; others don't."
When counseling does not help, HEAL Africa offers lessons in sewing and handicrafts to teach them to survive financially. She says rejected women who don't get help often are forced from communities and become beggars.
"Sometimes I have nightmares," Tshomba says. "When I leave after hearing all these horror stories, really it's like my brain is on fire. I have to listen to some jazz to ease my soul."
But there are successes like 13-year-old Harriet, who came to HEAL Africa four years ago. Harriet's parents were killed by the rebels who attacked her and then burned down their home in Rutshuru, north of Goma. She now lives with a woman who counseled her at the hospital.
On this day, Harriet is so delighted she cannot stop grinning, a wide beam that's infectious in its joy. Her fingernails are black with dirt, but she is wearing lip gloss and eyeliner.
"Today, I got my results and I am top of my class," she announces, flaunting a report that shows she averaged 88.5 percent in math, French and English exams.
"When I came to HEAL Africa, I had never been to school. I was 9 years old. Now I'm beating students who have been to school all their lives," she says. "My teacher says I'm very intelligent, that I should go to school in the United States."
As for the future: "I think I want to be a doctor, so that I can help people the way these doctors helped me."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29719277/
Friday, March 6, 2009
Heal Africa Hospital in the DRC
Where Do Your Donations Go?
HEAL Africa programs and initiatives are run locally, not instituted from a remote location with little understanding of the situation on the ground.
$10 Will:
Buy two hoes
Buy seeds for a garden
Provide a family with mosquito nets
Buy a dress for a woman in the fistula repair program
$20 Will:
Buy sewing supplies for a woman who has learned tailoring
School uniforms for two children
Provide malaria medication and medical treatment
$50 Will:
Buy rabbits for family who cares for orphans
Tuition and supplies for a child in school for 6 months
Support a literacy program for patients at the hospital
$100 Will:
Give a micro-grant and financial training to a family in extreme poverty
Train an activist in HIV/AIDS or a counselor for victims of sexual violence
Give a sewing machine to a patient who has learned to sew at the hospital vocational training program
$200 Will
Provide basic medication to a rural health center
Train two midwives in rural areas with lack of access to healthcare
Support a literacy program for patients at the hospital
Give vocational training and community support to a demobilized child soldier
$400 Will:
Pay for one woman's fistula repair
Pay for a child's orthopedic operation
$1000 Will:
Pay for Antiretroviral medications for three HIV positive children for one year
Pay for the tuition of a HEAL Africa doctor's specialization courses
$1500 Will
Buy a field for a widows group to farm
Support HEAL Africa's orthopedic officers program training rural nurses
$5000 Will:
Build a safe house for women, where women can spend the night in safety en route to medical care in Goma or on the way home, a place where women can learn new skills, have someone to listen to them, and be cared for.
Help build HEAL Africa's child soldier community demobilization program
DONATE NOW @ http://www.healafrica.org/cms/participate/donations/
HEAL Africa programs and initiatives are run locally, not instituted from a remote location with little understanding of the situation on the ground.
$10 Will:
Buy two hoes
Buy seeds for a garden
Provide a family with mosquito nets
Buy a dress for a woman in the fistula repair program
$20 Will:
Buy sewing supplies for a woman who has learned tailoring
School uniforms for two children
Provide malaria medication and medical treatment
$50 Will:
Buy rabbits for family who cares for orphans
Tuition and supplies for a child in school for 6 months
Support a literacy program for patients at the hospital
$100 Will:
Give a micro-grant and financial training to a family in extreme poverty
Train an activist in HIV/AIDS or a counselor for victims of sexual violence
Give a sewing machine to a patient who has learned to sew at the hospital vocational training program
$200 Will
Provide basic medication to a rural health center
Train two midwives in rural areas with lack of access to healthcare
Support a literacy program for patients at the hospital
Give vocational training and community support to a demobilized child soldier
$400 Will:
Pay for one woman's fistula repair
Pay for a child's orthopedic operation
$1000 Will:
Pay for Antiretroviral medications for three HIV positive children for one year
Pay for the tuition of a HEAL Africa doctor's specialization courses
$1500 Will
Buy a field for a widows group to farm
Support HEAL Africa's orthopedic officers program training rural nurses
$5000 Will:
Build a safe house for women, where women can spend the night in safety en route to medical care in Goma or on the way home, a place where women can learn new skills, have someone to listen to them, and be cared for.
Help build HEAL Africa's child soldier community demobilization program
DONATE NOW @ http://www.healafrica.org/cms/participate/donations/
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Stand with Congolese Women and Girls!
46
THE AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY FOR A WOMAN IN THE DR CONGO
1.3
THE NUMBER, IN MILLIONS, OF ADULTS LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS IN THE REGION
800,000
THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN WHO HAVE BECOME ORPHANS DUE TO AIDS
20
THE PERCENTAGE OF CHILDREN WHO DO NOT LIVE PAST THE AGE OF FIVE
The people who have bravely shared their images with the photographers in this exhibition are experiencing the individual reality of the crisis reflected by these statistics. We invite you to show your support for the women and girls of Congo by joining our online gallery and being counted in their numbers.
Go to www.congowomen.org/stand-with-the-women-and-girls-of-the-drc/ and upload your pic today!
THE AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY FOR A WOMAN IN THE DR CONGO
1.3
THE NUMBER, IN MILLIONS, OF ADULTS LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS IN THE REGION
800,000
THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN WHO HAVE BECOME ORPHANS DUE TO AIDS
20
THE PERCENTAGE OF CHILDREN WHO DO NOT LIVE PAST THE AGE OF FIVE
The people who have bravely shared their images with the photographers in this exhibition are experiencing the individual reality of the crisis reflected by these statistics. We invite you to show your support for the women and girls of Congo by joining our online gallery and being counted in their numbers.
Go to www.congowomen.org/stand-with-the-women-and-girls-of-the-drc/ and upload your pic today!
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Women of North Kivu Clamor for Peace
(taken from www.healafrica.org)
There were hundreds of women who rallied together on January 9th at the main entrance of Unity Stadium in Goma to protest strongly together about the current peace negotiations in Nairobi, demanding a cease in hostilities and lasting peace.
They were standing up in lines without moving, communicating their messages in seriousness and those passing by were curious to read the words written on their signs.
One could not mistake the following message:
We are tired of this war; we claim peace, no excuses anymore. Why do we let ourselves be manipulated? Why are you killing your own brother? Let us love one another. May God bless DR Congo and may all displaced people return back to their home villages.
All of them gathered in a coalition called Congolese Women’s Voice. The women of North Kivu transformed themselves with the written phrases on their clothes claiming for peace, written in capital letters, both French and Swahili.
Messages were displayed in kiosks, on poles and on visible public places. Pedestrians and vehicles were stopping to look at the messages. Those passing by encouraged the women to continue to fight for peace. ‘We are exhausted of war,’ they said.
The voices of people rang out through the stadium: ‘Enough is Enough,’
The four-hour long protest included speeches from both Congolese women and men. The national press covered the event, which called on the Africa Union, the United Nations, and the international community to be serious about resolving the conflict in the eastern region of DR Congo because all parties have a vested interest in the rich natural resources of Congo.
People from refugee camps surrounding Goma walked 10-15km into town to participate in the rally for peace. They circled the stadium to sing songs of freedom and praises to God. Two prayers closed the rally, one by a Christian woman and one by a Muslim woman.
Both prayed that God would grant peace, and peace alone.
There were hundreds of women who rallied together on January 9th at the main entrance of Unity Stadium in Goma to protest strongly together about the current peace negotiations in Nairobi, demanding a cease in hostilities and lasting peace.
They were standing up in lines without moving, communicating their messages in seriousness and those passing by were curious to read the words written on their signs.
One could not mistake the following message:
We are tired of this war; we claim peace, no excuses anymore. Why do we let ourselves be manipulated? Why are you killing your own brother? Let us love one another. May God bless DR Congo and may all displaced people return back to their home villages.
All of them gathered in a coalition called Congolese Women’s Voice. The women of North Kivu transformed themselves with the written phrases on their clothes claiming for peace, written in capital letters, both French and Swahili.
Messages were displayed in kiosks, on poles and on visible public places. Pedestrians and vehicles were stopping to look at the messages. Those passing by encouraged the women to continue to fight for peace. ‘We are exhausted of war,’ they said.
The voices of people rang out through the stadium: ‘Enough is Enough,’
The four-hour long protest included speeches from both Congolese women and men. The national press covered the event, which called on the Africa Union, the United Nations, and the international community to be serious about resolving the conflict in the eastern region of DR Congo because all parties have a vested interest in the rich natural resources of Congo.
People from refugee camps surrounding Goma walked 10-15km into town to participate in the rally for peace. They circled the stadium to sing songs of freedom and praises to God. Two prayers closed the rally, one by a Christian woman and one by a Muslim woman.
Both prayed that God would grant peace, and peace alone.
Help the IRC and Aisha Tyler Win Big on "Celebrity Jeopardy!"
On March 10, tune in to "Celebrity Jeopardy!" to cheer on actor and comedian Aisha Tyler as she competes for more than $25,000 in winnings for her favorite charities -- including the IRC's lifesaving programs in war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.
Visit Jeopardy.com to find out where and when to watch.
Visit Jeopardy.com to find out where and when to watch.
The Invisible War
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 21, 2009
Perhaps we’ve heard so little about them because the crimes are so unspeakable, the evil so profound.
For years now, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marauding bands of soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women. This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s.
Millions have been killed. Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.
“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries.
In some cases, the rapists have violated their victims with loaded guns and pulled the triggers. Other women have had their organs deliberately destroyed by knives or other weapons. Sons have been forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers. Many women and girls have been abducted and sexually enslaved.
It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed. As The Times’s Jeffrey Gettleman, on assignment in Congo, wrote last fall: “Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.”
Dr. Mukwege visited me at The Times last week. He was accompanied by the playwright, Eve Ensler, who has been passionate in her efforts to bring attention and assistance to the women of Congo. I asked Dr. Mukwege to explain how it was in the strategic interest of the various armed groups to rape and otherwise brutalize women. He described some of the ramifications of such atrocities and the ways in which they undermine the entire society in which the women live.
“Once they have raped these women in such a public way,” he said, “sometimes maiming them, destroying their sexual organs — and with everybody watching — the women themselves are destroyed, or virtually destroyed. They are traumatized and humiliated on every level, physical and psychological. That’s the first consequence. “The second consequence is that the whole family and the entire neighborhood is traumatized by what they have seen. The ordinary sense of family and community is lost after a man has been forced to watch his wife being raped, or parents are forced to watch the rape of their daughters, or children see their mothers raped.
“Neighbors are witnesses to this. Many flee. Families are dislocated. Social relationships are lost. There is no more social network, village network. Not only the victims have been destroyed; the whole village is destroyed.”
The devastating injuries treated by Dr. Mukwege at his hospital can all but stun the imagination. There is no need to detail them further here. AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are commonplace. Often the ability to bear children is destroyed. In many other cases, women end up giving birth to the children of their rapists. “The hospital can take care of 3,600 women every year,” said Dr. Mukwege. “That is our maximum capacity. We can’t take any more.”
He spoke of ambulance teams that would drive into villages and be besieged by rape victims desperately seeking treatment. “It is awful to see 300 women in need of help,” he said, “and you have to take 10 because the ambulance can only take 10.”
Ms. Ensler spoke of her encounter with an 8-year-old girl during one of her trips to Congo. The girl’s father had been killed in an attack, her mother was raped, and the girl herself was abducted. The child was raped by groups of soldiers over a two-week period and then abandoned. The girl felt too ashamed to allow herself to be held, Ms. Ensler said, because her injuries had left her incontinent.
After explaining how she persuaded the child to accept an embrace, to be hugged, Ms. Ensler said, “If we’re living in a century when an 8-year-old girl is incontinent because that many soldiers have raped her, then something has gone terribly wrong.”
Despite the presence in the region of the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, no one has been able to stop the systematic rape of the Congolese women.
If these are not war crimes, crimes against humanity, then nothing is.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 21, 2009, on page A21 of the New York edition.
Published: February 21, 2009
Perhaps we’ve heard so little about them because the crimes are so unspeakable, the evil so profound.
For years now, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marauding bands of soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women. This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s.
Millions have been killed. Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.
“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries.
In some cases, the rapists have violated their victims with loaded guns and pulled the triggers. Other women have had their organs deliberately destroyed by knives or other weapons. Sons have been forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers. Many women and girls have been abducted and sexually enslaved.
It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed. As The Times’s Jeffrey Gettleman, on assignment in Congo, wrote last fall: “Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.”
Dr. Mukwege visited me at The Times last week. He was accompanied by the playwright, Eve Ensler, who has been passionate in her efforts to bring attention and assistance to the women of Congo. I asked Dr. Mukwege to explain how it was in the strategic interest of the various armed groups to rape and otherwise brutalize women. He described some of the ramifications of such atrocities and the ways in which they undermine the entire society in which the women live.
“Once they have raped these women in such a public way,” he said, “sometimes maiming them, destroying their sexual organs — and with everybody watching — the women themselves are destroyed, or virtually destroyed. They are traumatized and humiliated on every level, physical and psychological. That’s the first consequence. “The second consequence is that the whole family and the entire neighborhood is traumatized by what they have seen. The ordinary sense of family and community is lost after a man has been forced to watch his wife being raped, or parents are forced to watch the rape of their daughters, or children see their mothers raped.
“Neighbors are witnesses to this. Many flee. Families are dislocated. Social relationships are lost. There is no more social network, village network. Not only the victims have been destroyed; the whole village is destroyed.”
The devastating injuries treated by Dr. Mukwege at his hospital can all but stun the imagination. There is no need to detail them further here. AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are commonplace. Often the ability to bear children is destroyed. In many other cases, women end up giving birth to the children of their rapists. “The hospital can take care of 3,600 women every year,” said Dr. Mukwege. “That is our maximum capacity. We can’t take any more.”
He spoke of ambulance teams that would drive into villages and be besieged by rape victims desperately seeking treatment. “It is awful to see 300 women in need of help,” he said, “and you have to take 10 because the ambulance can only take 10.”
Ms. Ensler spoke of her encounter with an 8-year-old girl during one of her trips to Congo. The girl’s father had been killed in an attack, her mother was raped, and the girl herself was abducted. The child was raped by groups of soldiers over a two-week period and then abandoned. The girl felt too ashamed to allow herself to be held, Ms. Ensler said, because her injuries had left her incontinent.
After explaining how she persuaded the child to accept an embrace, to be hugged, Ms. Ensler said, “If we’re living in a century when an 8-year-old girl is incontinent because that many soldiers have raped her, then something has gone terribly wrong.”
Despite the presence in the region of the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, no one has been able to stop the systematic rape of the Congolese women.
If these are not war crimes, crimes against humanity, then nothing is.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 21, 2009, on page A21 of the New York edition.
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