Since the start of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) war in 1998, aid workers say that in eastern Sud-Kivu province alone more than 8 000 rape cases have been reported, or about 30 people every week.
But the figure given by the aid workers is probably only the tip of the iceberg, because most rape victims prefer to keep the shame of what they went through to themselves.
Attitudes towards rape also mean that victims hesitate to seek medical help, and women are stigmatised for life.
”Girls in the region marry very young and while still virgins, and once a husband knows she has been with another man — in whatever circumstances — he normally rejects her,” World Food Programme (WFP) official Gertrude Mudekereza explained in Sud-Kivu’s provincial capital, Bukavu.
Suzanne Yalala is a strikingly beautiful 22-year-old mother-of-three living in Kalundja, a village of thatched huts and palm trees, six kilometres north of Baraka on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.
One night in February 2002, she was gang-raped by nine men whom she described as Burundian Forces for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) rebels, who were fighting the government at home from bases in eastern DRC.
The attack weakened her so much that she was unable to move from the floor of the house where it had taken place.
”My neighbours found me and took me to the dispensary, but as soon as I went home, my husband moved out. When I asked my parents-in-law where he had gone, they were very dismissive and said they did not know,” Yalala said.
Nine months after the rape, Suzanne bore a son she named Baruwan.
”He is the child of the FDD, but I love him just as much as my other children because despite everything, he is my flesh,” she said as she nursed the infant.
Asked whether she had been tested for HIV or any sexually-transmitted diseases following the rape, she said she had been given some tablets, which she had taken, ”but no tests were carried out.”
”Very often the person running the dispensary is from the same family as the victim and so she is afraid to say what really happened to her,” said Safi Rutanga, who runs the Baraka branch of Solidarity Among Women for Well-being of the Family, an association that helps rape victims.
”When people bump into me on the road, they point at me and say, there goes the FDD’s woman,” Yalala said sadly.
Yalala’s neighbour Charlotte Mateso is also a rape victim.
”I went to the health centre, but I couldn’t tell them I’d been raped. I could only tell them I was sick here. No examination was carried out, only tablets were handed out,” Mateso said, patting her stomach.
Mateso said she still lives under the same roof as her husband, but he acknowledges her presence only to beat her.
”Our children tell him to take another wife and to leave me alone. Maybe he will,” she said.
Mudekereza, who has done a lot to highlight the problem of rape in the region, said that at Mwenga, an area northwest of Kalundja, the problem of rape has reached proportions that have forced communities to start ”purifying” victims through rituals, rather than rejecting them.
”It reached a point where all the women and girls had been raped,” said Mudekereza in Kalundja.
”At first the husbands repudiated their wives and then when they realised they would have to repudiate everyone, they started a public purification ritual,” she said. ”The ritual has not yet spread to Kalundja.”
The war in DRC has claimed some 2,5-million lives since it erupted in August 1998 and is considered ”the deadliest documented conflict in African history,” a US-based refugee agency, International Rescue Committee (IRC), said in a report released last April. – Sapa-AFP