Discussing Something Serious...

News Africa

Rape used as weapon in DR Congo


The Democratic Republic of Congo is grappling with rampant rape, which has become an every day practice and is used as a weapon of war, the UN has said.

It said almost 5,400 cases of rape against women were reported in the South Kivu province during the first six months of the year.

Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said South Kivu, near Rwanda, was an increasingly dangerous place for civilians, especially for women.

"Night-time attacks against civilians by unidentified armed elements, and rape against women, remain widespread," Byrs said.

About 90 per cent of the rapes are allegedly committed by armed groups or regular forces.

Nabwemba Natabaro, a woman in South Kivu, told Al Jazeera that she had been held in the bush for two months and repeatedly gang raped, after being abducted from her village.

"My family thought I had been killed and lost all hope of ever seeing me. Then I managed to escape. I was very sick," she said.

Her family brought her to a hospital where she was diagnosed with HIV.

'Tortured by attackers'

Rossette Kavira, a gynaecologist at a hospital in the town of Goma, said: "There isn’t a single day that we don't get raped women coming to the hospital. This explains how widespread the problem is.

"Almost all victims require surgery due to bleeding or wounds inflicted through torture by their attackers."

Due to the huge numbers of rape victims, some women have to wait for months for reconstructive surgery.

Dede Amanor-Wilks, Action Aid's director for West and Central Africa, said many rape cases go unreported.

"Currently the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] is thought to have the highest incident of rape in the world, but statistics that come to surface are only a fraction probably of the rapes that actually occur," she told Al Jazeera.

"Different statistics are coming up in different parts of the eastern DRC all the time. One commonly used statistic is that there are about 400 rapes a day."

Al Jazeera's Mohammed Adow, reporting from Goma, said there were growing fears that the use of rape was turning into a norm in the DR Congo conflict.

"Rape has been used by all armed groups as a weapon that is more readily available than bullets and bombs.

"In many cases the social stigma associated with rape leaves the survivors shunned by husbands, parents and their communities," he said.

The fighting in the eastern DRC between UN-backed Congolese government forces and Rwandan Hutu rebels have worsened in recent months.

The country hosts one of the biggest UN aid operations. Hundreds of thousands of people in the east of the country have been driven from their homes due to fighting, many of whom need protection from violent attacks.


Source: Al Jazeera and agencies





Obviously there are things that make the news around the world that never make the news here. That's for good reason. Things like this bring too many emotions out of the average American. It can scare, enrage and engage us all at once. Some are too sickened to read, and some might just cry because Americans never really know how to handle their emotions anyway. The prior article might have been commonplace reading in say, South America, where passion and war and suffering are all understood, and the news is much different. Americans, in their comfort with the with the seclusion of the United States are usually intrigued, but not too intrigued by the sad story so far away. Stories like this though, scare the daylights out of everyone. It brings back the American's deepest fear, the lowest elements of life.

This country's resounding fear is obvious-we fear things that are beneath us. We fear dirt, poor people because they're belligerent, homeless people and rats because they live on the lowest and most basic level of life. We fear those without compassion, or compassion for themselves or their people. We fear those with no compassion for life, babies, for the female reproductive system. These are the things in our minds that we want furthest away from dirt, and the lowest things that exist. So our view of war and the several continuing wars on this earth is a slightly blindfolded one. We are semi-conscious of the ones we are involved in, a few more than half are against what we're doing, and for the most part, all of us "support the troops" whether it means clapping in stadiums or sporting a bumper sticker.

But war is obviously more real than a bunch of white guys in tan tanks rolling through the desert. War happens everywhere. It breaks out in villages and cities all over the world. Despicable tactics are used all the time, and people suffer. In Congo, just as in some other African nations, war means pillaging. It means making the scars, wounds and losses of that war permanent. We're used to civilized war, shooting from far away, and traveling to the other side of the world. We're not used to war in our homes and in our beds. In no way do we understand how sex and rape could be used as a weapon, and for all of those reasons, stories like this aren't ones that reach the average American.

If you've never understood it before, it's why we're obviously so hated. Being able to feel so untouchable and civilized that we live above things that are realities breeds resentment. The United States marketed itself for so long as a free, capitalist, free-enterprise place that those multitudes of immigrants who came here in the last two-hundred years saw the disconnect between foreign and domestic affairs as a positive if things were so positive in the United States. The American people have enjoyed it so much that it's increased year-to-year. War is nothing but a television show in a far off place unless you know people fighting, and most Americans can't name three African nations. Suffering around the world is simply far less important than an all-new One Tree Hill, or a Facebook status update about the weather. So, if you were sickened by the article, I was too, but the same way those people who committed those atrocious acts had no regard for the suffering of humans, neither do we, really.