In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, more than a year after the end of the war in the vast Central African country, rape continues to be widespread, steeping its victims in agony while their attackers almost always get off scot-free.
Aid workers in Sud-Kivu province said in December that more than 8 000 rape cases had been reported there alone since the start of the war in 1998, or around 30 people every week.
But the figure is probably only the tip of the iceberg, because most rape victims prefer to keep the shame of what they went through to themselves.
”Rape existed before, but it really took on huge proportions with the war,” said Justine Masika who works for a rape victims’ aid group based in Goma, the main town in Nord-Kivu province.
Violence against women has not subsided, even with the end of the five-year war in DRC, in which some 2,5-million people died, said Masika.
The outlying areas of Goma are still crawling with groups of armed men, including Rwandan rebels accused of carrying out their country’s genocide in 1994.
”The men who raped me were Interahamwe fighters,” said Ndusabe, a young mother of four from Mushaki, 40km northwest of Goma, referring to the Rwandan Hutu extremists accused, along with the army and government at the time, of perpetrating the 1994 genocide.
”I know because they were talking in Kinyarwanda. But I wouldn’t be able to recognise them,” she said.
”It happened at night… last November,” she said from her bed in a clinic in Goma that specialises in caring for rape victims.
”There were five of them. They knocked on the door and my husband opened it. They tied up my husband and then gang-raped me, even though I was seven months pregnant,” she said.
Ndusabe lost her unborn child as a result of the rape. Her genitals and rectum were irreparably damaged in the Caesarean section carried out to remove the dead baby from her womb.
She untied the many layers of skirt that she was wearing to show her lower stomach, bloated above a mound of badly stitched scar tissue through which her urine and stools seep out.
Ndusabe’s husband has left her for another woman, but still visits her.
Many Congolese rape victims are later disowned by their husband or rejected by their family — leading many to keep quiet about the assault unless there are medical complications.
Rape generally goes unpunished in the country, adding injustice to the physical and moral suffering inflicted on the victims.
”There is general impunity,” according to Germaine Cirhigiri, who also works for the Goma rape victims’ group.
”First there is the problem of identifying the culprits” -‒ who are often armed, she said.
”Even when women denounce their assailants and we manage to identify them, we run into another problem: deep-rooted corruption throughout the legal system,” added Delly Mawazo, who is in charge of the group’s legal team.
In the rare cases where a rapist is arrested, many ”magistrates are quite happy to take $10, or $50 at the most, to let him out of prison,” she charged.
Even when the courts decide to act, three decades of corruption under the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, followed by eight years of war, have left the country’s infrastructure, including its legal system, utterly decrepit.
”For the whole of Nord-Kivu province, we have a single prosecutor’s office. Let’s say a rape takes place 200 kilometres away — the office doesn’t have a car, nor the money to send investigators to the scene,” Mawazo said. ‒ Sapa-AFP