It was while she was on her way to collect the body of her sister-in-law last year that Christine was raped. She resisted, so her attacker — a member of the main rebel group in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, she believes — shot her twice in the vagina. ”That taught the whole village a lesson,” she says, shifting with the carefulness of someone well used to pain. ”No one fights back any more.”
Christine (25) could have mistaken her attacker’s identity: Congolese, Rwandan and Burundian armies and rebel armies have all tramped through Kabondozi, close by Lake Tanganyika, in the past four years. ”Men in uniform come all the time and when they catch you, they rape you.”
With a ceasefire in place for more than a year, Congo’s regional war is almost over. Of the seven foreign armies once operating in the area, only Rwandans and Zimbabweans remain in significant numbers; the latter to loot rather than fight. But in the east there are scores of local militias and a hundred small wars are raging. By the middle of last year 2,5-million people were estimated to have died because of the war in eastern Congo. But there is no better measure of the horror of the conflict than the daily expectation of rape.
”We’re talking about thousands of women being raped every day, by everybody,” says Claude Jibidar, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in the area. ”For me this is now the most horrific aspect of the war.”
Most of eastern Congo is off-limits to peacekeepers and aid workers, making statistical accuracy impossible, but in village after village the stories are the same. In the town of Shabunda last year up to 2 400 women were held hostage by a Rwandan interhamwe militia and repeatedly raped. In Kanyola district, a scattering of villages near Lake Kivu, 28 women were raped in public in February alone, a local human rights group says.
For every woman who admits being raped, according to Heritiers de la Justice, a human rights group, many more choose to stay silent.
Francine (20) does not have the luxury of choice. Three Mayi-Mayi fighters took turns to rape her in front of her family. When done, they killed her parents-in-law and niece. Pregnant at the time, she later miscarried.
During the Rwandan genocide — which spilled over into Congo, sparking the war — Tutsi women were raped systematically to spread terror and Aids. But in eastern Congo rape is the product of the general anarchy ravaging the country, Heritiers de la Justice says.
A senior official of the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) confirms this. ”There’s a lot of insecurity, people are afraid to go to their fields; every day in the bush women are being raped,” says Benjamin Serukiza, deputy governor of South Kivu province. ”Some of our men could be guilty, though 90% of rapes are committed by the other groups.”
There is no way to confirm his figure, but in a grimy hospital in Bukavu, the provincial capital, there is another Francine, this one just 14 years old. Two years ago three Mayi-Mayi fighters killed her father and raped her, after accusing them of growing food for the RCD. Six months later an RCD fighter raped her in the forest after accusing her of supplying the Mayi-Mayi. ”The second time, I knew what to expect, so I passed out,” says Francine, dandling her baby Pascal — her last surviving relative and the product of rape.
Last month peace talks between the RCD and the government in Kinshasa failed, ending a frail hope of law returning to eastern Congo. Meanwhile, as the violence continues — displacing communities, dividing families, degrading the culture — Heritiers de la Justice says that rape by civilians is beginning to rise as well. ”Congo has become infected by violence,” says Wakenge. ”When the war ends, we will not only need our schools, houses and roads rebuilding; we will also need our consciences healing.”