/ 23 October 2007

Rape leaves lifelong scars in DRC conflict zones

Recent conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Nord-Kivu province has been accompanied by an upsurge in brutal rape and often barbaric mutilations of women and girls, medical relief workers report.

“For the whole of Nord-Kivu we normally treat 250 rape cases each month,” Jane Coyne, the province’s mission chief for Médécins Sans Frontières (MSF — Doctors without Borders), told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“But in the first fortnight of September we saw an increase of 100%. About three-quarters of the rape victims say they were assaulted by armed men,” she said.

The upsurge of sexual violence against women came amid frequent clashes between the regular army and dissident troops loyal to renegade ex-general Laurent Nkunda in Nord-Kivu.

In the latest fighting, skirmishes broke out on Tuesday at Rugari, about 30km north of the provincial capital Goma, a UN spokesperson said.

About 750 000 people have fled their villages, leaving families exposed and vulnerable in a province wracked by successive civil wars and other conflicts since the mid-1990s.

The United States-based Human Rights Watch issued a 100-page report on Tuesday, the New Crisis in Nord-Kivu, which blamed fighters from all sides for many kinds of anti-civilian violence, not least rapes.

MSF’s Coyne and Congolese doctor Christophe Kimona, a specialist in trauma and post-rape injuries, agreed that the incidence of cases and the movement of rival armed forces in DRC go hand in hand.

“Historically there’s a direct correlation between the passage of armed men and rape cases,” said Kimona, who works in the Heal Africa hospital facilities in Goma.

“Most say the armed men intimidate them and they give way rather than being killed.”

The details are often harrowing. Kimona spoke of gang rapes where attackers mutilate their victims’ genitals until they need surgery.

“It’s not necessarily the rape itself that causes such injuries,” he said. “But when they’ve stopped raping a woman, they’ll shove a rifle barrel or other object up her vagina. We’ve also found women who’ve been raped by 10 to 15 men and who develop a fistula.

“Right now we’ve got a 13-year-old girl in the hospital after rape and they left a corn cob inside her … With the damage caused by this foreign body she’ll get a fistula” — a leakage to an internal organ.

Kimona said he expected the total number of rape cases requiring surgery to approach 450 by the end of this year compared with 250 in 2006.

One woman had gone five years without treatment before she showed up at the Heal Africa facility on Saturday. She had been raped by six rebels who left her for dead after forcing another woman to cut out her lifeless foetus.

More than 370 000 people have been displaced since the end of last year, according to the UN mission in DRC. At five displacement camps around Mugunga relief agencies have reported at least 38 rape cases since mid-September.

The Human Rights Watch report documented rapes, massacres, summary executions, looting and recruitment of child soldiers in Nord-Kivu since 2006, “committed by all parties to conflict”, including Mai-Mai militias and rebels from neighbouring Rwanda.

“Conflict resolution bids have not yet brought any relief to the civilian population,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, HRW’s research chief in the country.

HRW demanded urgent measures to protect civilians and an end to the environment of “almost total impunity” for those who commit such crimes. — AFP