Rape as a Weapon of War
Heart posted an announcement about The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a groundbreaking documentary distributed by Women Make Movies that exposes the systematic rape and torture of thousands of women and girls happening in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), being used as a weapon of war. The broadcast premiere will air on HBO, April 8, 10pm.
The civil war in the Congo was supposedly over, but tell that to the women tortured by gang rapes so vicious the vaginal wall loses its integrity, shootings in the vagina carefully so as not to kill, or piercing labia to padlock their vaginas. These men are carrying on a competition to invent the most fiendish forms of torture they can imagine. Instead of battling each other directly, women are used as pawns in an endless cycle of revenge.
Heart posted an article by Suki Falconberg about these unspeakable atrocities against women. 60 Minutes did a special report January 13, 2008. New York Times did a story on the Rape Epidemic last fall.
Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War
“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”
Newsweek did a story on fistula rape over a year ago. Those stories do not mention padlocking vaginas. This may be a new or previously unreported tactic in the competition of revengeful men to inflict the most pain on women. Mainstream reporters may have found it too difficult to believe, since ritualized female genital mutilation is not prevalent in Congo, but Ms. Falconberg linked a photo. She writes:
Of the many rape zones on Rape Planet Earth, the Congo is currently the most savage. After gang raping women and girls, soldiers are piercing their labia and padlocking their vaginas shut. Hot plastic as well as sticks and bayonets are being inserted into the women. Six-month-old girls have been raped to death.
Gang rapes are so severe that many women are suffering from fistula (the tearing of the vaginal wall so that the contents of the colon and urine seep in). Unable to reach medical care, some women are dying of massive infections. Even if the women do reach a doctor, fistula is very hard to repair—few practitioners can do it.
To intensify the cruelty, soldiers are even shooting women in the vagina, destroying their systems so completely that numerous operations are necessary—and even then repair may not be possible.
More Vicious Than Rape
The atrocity reports from eastern Congo were so hellish that Western medical experts refused to believe them—at first.
By Rod Nordland | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Nov 13, 2006This is about fistulas—and rape, which in Congo has become the continuation of war by other means. Fistulas are a kind of damage that is seldom seen in the developed world. Many obstetricians have encountered the condition only in their medical texts, as a rare complication associated with difficult or abnormal childbirths: a rupture of the walls that separate the vagina and bladder or rectum. Where health care is poor, particularly where trained doctors or midwives are not available, fistulas are more of a risk. They are a major health concern in many parts of Africa.
In eastern Congo, however, the problem is practically an epidemic. When a truce was declared in the war there in 2003, so many cases began showing up that Western medical experts at first called it impossible—especially when local doctors declared that most of the fistulas they were seeing were the consequence of rapes. “No one wanted to believe it at first,” says Lyn Lusi, manager of the HEAL Africa hospital (formerly called the Docs Hospital) in the eastern Congo city of Goma. “When our doctors first published their results, in 2003, this was unheard of.”
It had been no secret that nearly all sides in the Congo’s complex civil war resorted to systematic rape among civilian populations, and estimates were as high as a quarter million victims of sexual assault during the four-year-long conflict. But once fighting died down, victims began coming out of the jungles and forests and their condition was worse than anyone had imagined. Thousands of women had been raped so brutally that they had fistulas. They wandered into hospitals soaked in their own urine and feces, rendered incontinent by their injuries. “Pastors would say to me, ‘Jo, I can’t preach because the church is too smelly,” says Dr. Jo Lusi, a gynecologist and medical director at HEAL. (He and Lyn Lusi are husband and wife.) “No one wanted to be around them. These women were outcasts even more than rape victims usually are. They would say to me, ‘Dr. Jo, am I just a thing to throw away when I smell bad?’ ”
The rapes—and new reports of fistula damage—have not stopped. Even now, “It is still happening, even today,” says HEAL’s medical director, Doctor Lusi. “Every space we have in the hospital is very, very busy with people.” Most of the dozen or so militias in the country have signed on to peace terms, and their battles with each other and with the Congolese Army have mostly stopped since the arrival of United Nations peacekeepers. But many of the armed groups—even those that have made peace—continue to attack civilians, especially in rural areas. “They won’t go ahead and fight each other, [but] they attack that village that supports the other group,” says Lyn Lusi. “This is a horrible perpetual movement of militias. They join after their families are killed, sometimes right in front of them. They see their women raped, and then they go and do the same thing. It’s a cycle of violence.”
Ordinary rapes, even violent ones, do not usually cause fistulas, although it’s not medically impossible. Doctors in eastern Congo say they have seen cases that resulted from gang rapes where large numbers of militiamen repeatedly forced themselves on the victim. But more often the damage is caused by the deliberate introduction of objects into the victim’s vagina when the rape itself is over. The objects might be sticks or pipes. Or gun barrels. In many cases the attackers shoot the victim in the vagina at point-blank range after they have finished raping her. “Often they’ll do this carefully to make sure the woman does not die,” says Dr. Denis Mukwege, medical director of Panzi Hospital. “The perpetrators are trying to make the damage as bad as they can, to use it as a kind of weapon of war, a kind of terrorism.” Instead of just killing the woman, she goes back to her village permanently and obviously marked. “I think it’s a strategy put in place by these groups to disrupt society, to make husbands flee, to terrorize.”
Benga, 16, and Masoro, 17, ask themselves the same thing. The two friends were abducted along with their mothers from the remote South Kivu village of Nzingu. Their captors dragged them to an Interhamwe camp. “When we got there,” Masoro recalls, “they said, ‘This is a horrible place where girls and women suffer, and you will suffer also’.” They were kept tied to trees except when they were doing domestic chores or being raped. Their mothers were raped in front of the girls. Benga bursts into tears recalling the experience. “Their purpose is simply to ruin people, to rape people,” she says. “I don’t know why.”
No one can say why. The answer is almost too awful to consider, and impossible to understand.
Impossible to understand, says this male author. Perhaps he does not want to understand. This is the logical extreme of the male sense of entitlement. These men see women as pawns, subhuman property, to be used to make a point, to get back at the men of rival tribes who did similar things to their women. For that purpose, the worse they can hurt the women of their rivals, the better. They can revel in their cruelty, the sickly sweet taste of revenge. Women are less than human to these men. When they fight directly, they fight to kill, but death is not sufficient for the women; they must be made to suffer, as much as possible, the more the better they like it, torturing women the means to its own end, for its own sake. What is it about men that allows them to sink to this? All is fair in war, even the most sadistic forms of torture they can enjoy?
Men like to dismiss male violence against women as the actions of a few, so why should they have any responsibility, ignoring the issue of who else could. Men may justify disassociating for all sorts of reasons, but they should have some clue about what can make men abuse women so horribly. Men abuse women in many ways, ranging from such torture as pawns of tribal warfare to violence to control women in relationships. However men justify any of this, notwithstanding all the variations, it is all the same principle, that women are sex objects who must be controlled, as property or objects for the cruelest revenge.
Men are not dumb brutes. Why is it so hard to find a way to negotiate differences? Money and male pride? What can drive a man to assault women so viciously? What? Hatred of women inflamed by attack on their women? War is supposed to be a rational way of dealing with enemies? Men have it all backwards, as usual. Peacekeepers are in the Congo, but they cannot stop this. The men of the warring tribes have to come to terms, or let their women forge a settlement, or the cycle will continue to escalate.
What will it take to stop ethnic cleansing, if such brutality can go on with impunity? It is said, war is hell, all is fair in war, but there is such a concept as war crime. This deliberate maiming of women goes well beyond that. Did men not once have more than the worst form of revenge in their minds, even in battle? More peacekeepers might help, but that misses the point. What goes on in male brains, that makes them think this is an acceptable tactic of warfare? Is this expressing their sense of manhood? Honor? Decency? Fair play? Justice? Is all that out the window in the hot pursuit of revenge, so torturing women as savagely as conceivable becomes the end, the instrument to revenge what was done to the women of their tribe? Men, I ask, seriously, how can men do this? A woman has her theories and rage, but men must know what it is in them that makes this possible. What kind of war is this, maiming defenseless women in a brutality contest? What makes gang rape possible? How do men get off on such brutality? Is that fed by imagery of sexualized brutality? Is that not a booming business on this Internet? Why do men patronize such images, so clearly not about any kind of healthy sexuality? What makes rape possible, usually justifiable in the eyes of the rapist and many with a sympathetic view? Boys will be boys, so the most savage forms of rape and mutilation are justifiable revenge?
It is all connected, in the dark recesses of male minds who enjoy cruelty to women, inferior sex objects men must keep under control, or abuse as proxies to top the viciousness to make a statement of revenge. War and revenge may be expected to bring out the worst in people. If there are worse ways to torture women, it seems there are men determined to find it. It is too easy for men to disassociate, disown responsibility. If a man can sensibly explain how men can do this, I will approve the comment. I think men have a lot of explaining to do about raping, humiliating, battering women, and about war, political reality, and the ways men run things.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Eve Ensler went to visit Dr. Denis Mukwege, writing a long article for Glamour. Thanks to Anne Walker who posted the article, Women left for dead—and the man who’s saving them, at the Global Sisterhood Network.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Good Day Althea, thank you very much for this article. It is very well written. I particularly liked your commentry after the excerpt. My name is Nicole Hosein and I am a member of a feminist group called Consciousness Raising from Trinidad in the West Indies. I first heard about what ws happening in the Congo only a few days ago actually. I saw a special on BBC World and I was moved to tears, anger and frustration at what was going on. I recently posted your article on the group’s facebook page and hope to get some feedback which I would like to share with you. Why are women and children always the innocent victims in war? Why is there this horrendous torture happening to women and children? The artocities happening to these women and children long after a truce was declared is outrageous! Women have been and continue to be oppressed by men in ways that are beyond cruel and humiliating. The sisters and brothers of Consciousness Raising stand in support of their sisters in the Congo. We cannot physically be there with them at this time but our prayers and thoughts are with them. We will do what we can to raise awareness about their devastating situation in our country.
Always in solidarity
Nicole Hosein
May 16th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
I do not think that truce meant much to the warring parties, except possibly that now instead of battling directly, they prefer to use women as pawns in this horrendous cycle of revenge. That is nothing new, only possibly the sheer viciousness and scale of these atrocities are unusual, such that the Western experts at first did not want to believe it possible.
I would be interested in any feedback you get about this. Most people have heard about the nightmare in Darfur, but for some reason, this situation in Congo is not so well publicized.
November 7th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
The Belfast Telegraph posted on Halloween a very long story about the situation in the Congo, Congo’s tragedy: the war the world has forgotten , which I found in a post at the Feminist Peace Network, Women’s Bodies Are The Battlefield Of War In The Democratic Republic Of Congo. Lucinda Marshall at FPN bolded this in her excerpt from that report:
Will there be no end to this madness?
November 21st, 2008 at 11:26 pm
The United Nations has authorized a few thousand more peacekeepers, bringing the grand total to about twenty thousand to keep the peace in this nation the size of Western Europe. Soldiers are still raping and pillaging. From a Yahoo News Associated Press story
There are hopeful signs amidst the turmoil. Other African nations may be willing to send in peacekeepers. Congo President Joseph Kabila hints he may be ready to talk to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, and the rebels apparently have some regard for the endangered gorillas.
One can only hope a new peace agreement will mean more than the last one. The endless cycle of revenge is no respecter of peace agreements. There was a truce, but it was a farce; men stopped fighting each other, only to substitute raping women in unimaginably brutal ways as payback. The fighting has resumed, but rape continues to be a primary weapon of the warfare.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:12 am
When will the politians of the world finally stop talking and start taking some serious action in order to make an end to this cruelty? It’s also time for a change in that region!
http://ginovandewalle.com/the-worlds-need-to-help-eastern-congo-now-this-cruelty-must-stop/
December 17th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Heart blogged about a protest march yesterday
Heart also linked to this update from Muadi Mukenge, head of the Africa program at the Global Fund for Women.
The leaders of the rest of the world are more interested in the mineral riches of Congo than the plight of its people. That men are using rape as a weapon of war is a matter for United Nations to pass resolutions and pontificate solemnly about such horrendous war crimes, but effective action to stop it has not been forthcoming.
May 13th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Lest anyone think the practice of rape as a weapon of war is confined to a few barbaric African tribes, Heart posted this story from the Christian Science Monitor about similar atrocities in Colombia.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Eve Ensler has written an editorial for the Washington Post about how Security Council Resolution 1820, recognizing sexual violence as a widely used strategy of warfare a year ago, proved to be a bunch of hot air.
How is this possible? In the context of war, men generally view rape as a minor issue. Like civilian casualties, rape is seen as unavoidable collateral damage of war. Presumably this is possible the same way it is possible for USA and NATO to support the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, despite their brutal actions toward women rivaling the depredations of the Taliban. Not to mention USA and NATO continuing to prop up Hamid Karzai after he went out of his way to support legislation making it perfectly legal for Shia men to rape their wives. President Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed outrage, and Karzai promised to have the offending language removed, but that was a sham. He did it to bolster his support among the Shia in view of the upcoming election, and I have heard nothing to suggest the bill has been revised.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Hillary Clinton met with some of the survivors of these atrocities today. This story is from Reuters
True, she has no magic wand, but USA and other nations could be doing a lot more. The campaign of terror men on all sides are waging against women in this war has never been a high priority for nations coveting the mineral wealth, and notwithstanding Clinton making an issue of these “crimes against humanity,” it is doubtful her visit will change anything.
August 12th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Hillary Clinton used much more precise and direct language last week, during a press conference in Nairobi, Kenya.
Why when on the scene did she resort to the gender-neutral language construct, crimes against humanity? Was it because of the boys who had also been raped? Was she pressured to tone down her unapologetic denunciation of male atrocities against women? Raping males can also be a weapon of war, and the sex of the victim does not make the crime any more or less atrocious, but presumably the vast majority of people men have raped in this war zone are female.
August 17th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
This was my response to an avid Clinton supporter on a related thread at womensspace.org, thrilled that she was finally putting it out there:
I doubt anyone doubted that Hillary Clinton could put it out there, but unfortunately US actions speak louder than words. Lucinda Marshall at the Feminist Peace Network points out how US policy is making life worse for women in DRC. She says in her entry U.S. Actions Belie U.S. Words When It Comes To Protecting Women In The DRC (& Afghanistan &Iraq) From Violence
(Bolds hers) Ms. Marshall also posted a couple of entries denouncing the Shia Personal Status Law and the sorry excuse USA and Britain floated for not protesting it, concern that a strong protest might disrupt the election.
So Secretary Clinton is capable of direct language on behalf of oppressed women, but meanwhile US policy seems pretty much business as usual. As Ms. Marshall says,
The President is more directly responsible for foreign policy than the Secretary of State, but still, where is her outcry? Is her criticism of abuses of women limited to what would not come into conflict with US policy? This is one of my issues with mainstream Democratic feminists. It seems all too often they are Democrats first and feminists second.
September 9th, 2010 at 12:15 am
The rapes are still going on, and very little is being done about it. This story is from BBC News
Unfortunately there are still reports of Congolese government forces committing some of these rapes. No one has clean hands in this war zone. The women are pawns in an endless cycle of retribution.
More on the strange twists of this conflict from an August 27 BBC News Q&A
Rape has been part of war since time immemorial, but the sheer scale and brazenness of these war crimes may be unusual. Why in this day and age are wars allowed to go on at all? One major purpose of the United Nations is to settle disputes peaceably. This may seem impractical, but I have to ask, will men ever grow up? Men feel entitled to kill each other, to rape women as a means of retribution, to commit all manner of atrocities because their compulsions to exact revenge and plunder are stronger than their capacity to reason? I do not believe that, but it is clear that capacity to reason goes out the window when men find a reason to fight.
May 14th, 2011 at 12:28 am
Eve Ensler has written a furious article for the Ms. blog, explaining why she is over it with the coverage, studies, and inaction about the continuing plague of rape in the DRC.
What is President Obama waiting for? He certainly is selective about putting pressure on governments who abuse their people. If those governments are considered friendly, it seems to be hands off. Obama and Secretary of State Clinton took long enough to decide to put any pressure on Hosni Mubarak; after it became clear he would not be able to maintain his position, suddenly USA decided it wanted to be on the right side of history. Libya has lots of oil, and Gaddafi has not been seen as a reliable US ally. This bears repeating:
USA talks a good game about human rights, but its real interests are that of a less than benevolent empire.