DR Congo: we are all implicated in the carnage – we can no longer ignore it

Vava Tampa, The Guardian

Denis Mukwege, the Congolese gynaecologist who treated thousands of rape victims during the war, is tipped to win the Nobel peace prize this week – ahead of Malala Yousafzai. Whatever the decision, his work – and the situation in the country – deserves global recognition.

Some of the horror stories I have heard from women rape victims have truly haunted me. Some of the women, after being raped, had chemicals poured into their inside. Others were shot apart by rifle blasts. One family friend's aunt, Masika Katsuva, was raped with her two daughters and then forced to eat her dead husband's genitals which had been cut off by the rebels.

For the past 15 years, Congo has been the scene of the bloodiest violence since the second world war. The conflict began in 1998 when Laurent Kabila – who, with the support of a loose assembly of regional armies, had forced Mobutu from power 15 months earlier – fell out with his original backers. Rwanda's Paul Kagame and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, under the pretext of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, had enlisted Mobutu's military to reinvade Congo to topple Kabila. The invasion drew in Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia on Congo's side, while Burundi lined up with Rwanda and Uganda, and set the stage for the tragedy that continues to the present day.

The human cost has been in the millions; and the cost in terms of social and human development is incalculable. More than 5 million perished in the first 10 years of the wars and an estimated 45,000 people continue to die each month.

Yet we rarely hear anything about it. Out of sight, out of mind. Though ironically Congo is actually never too far from us. We carry a piece of it with us every single day. One of the reasons the Congo wars have continued is the scramble for its highly valuable minerals. Congo is a home to some of the largest reserves of gold, tin, timber, diamond, copper, cobalt, tungsten and tantalum – to name but a few – in Africa. The most lucrative of all is columbite-tantalite, better known as coltan: a dull metallic ore that stores electricity and makes our mobile phones vibrate.

Democratic Republic of the Congo's women hold key to lasting peace

Mary Robinson, The Guardian


Not a week goes by without reports of fresh fighting in the eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Violence and destruction have ravaged the Great Lakes region of Africa for two decades, claiming more than 5 million lives. Yet the situation rarely makes the headlines.

What strikes me is the lack of outrage and horror, particularly given the disproportionate impact the conflict is having on women and children. As I asked the UN security council last month, how can we accept a situation where rape and sexual violence – which, let us be clear, are war crimes – have become the norm?

When Ban Ki-moon asked me to become his special envoy for the Great Lakes in March, I felt a particular responsibility to the mothers, daughters and grandmothers who – since my first visit to the region, as president of Ireland in 1994 – have shared with me what they have suffered in Bujumbura, Bukavu, Goma, Kigali or Kinshasa.

In 20 years of killings, rape, destruction and displacement, these women have suffered most. Yet I believe they are the region's best hope for building lasting peace. My job now, and the job of the international community, is to support them in every way we can.

Women's voices should not only be heard because they are the victims of the war. Their active participation in peace efforts is essential, because they are the most effective peace builders. As men take up arms, women hold communities together in times of war. This makes them stronger and better equipped to play a key role in securing real peace, as we have seen in Northern Ireland, Liberia and elsewhere.

DR Congo: M23 Rebels Kill, Rape Civilians

Human Rights Watch

(Goma) – M23 rebels have summarily executed at least 44 people and raped at least 61 women and girls since March 2013 in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Local residents and rebel deserters reported recent forced recruitment of men and boys by the M23 in both Rwanda and Congo.

After a nearly two-month-long ceasefire, fighting resumed on July 14 between the Congolese armed forces and M23 rebels near the eastern city of Goma.

Residents and rebel deserters described recent support from within Rwanda to the abusive M23 forces. This includes regular movements from Rwanda into Congo of men in Rwandan army uniforms, and the provision of ammunition, food, and other supplies from Rwanda to the M23. The M23 has been recruiting inside Rwanda. Rwandan military officers have trained new M23 recruits, and have communicated and met with M23 leaders on several occasions.

“Not only is Rwanda allowing its territory to be used by the abusive M23 to get recruits and equipment, but the Rwandan military is still directly supporting the M23,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This support is sustaining an armed group responsible for numerous killings, rapes and other serious abuses.”

The latest Human Rights Watch findings are based on more than 100 interviews since March, including with former M23 fighters who left the movement between late March and July and civilians living near the Congo-Rwanda border, some of whom were victims of abuses.

Rape of the Congo

Adam Hochschild (July 15, 2009)
The New York Review of Books


As if eastern Congo had not already suffered enough, seven years ago Nature dealt it a stunning blow. The volcano whose blue-green bulk looms above the dusty, lakeside city of Goma, Mount Nyiragongo, erupted, sending a smoking river of lava several hundred yards wide through the center of town and sizzling into the waters of Lake Kivu. More than 10,000 homes were engulfed. Parts of the city, which is packed with displaced people, are still covered by a layer of purplish rock up to twelve feet thick.

Far greater destruction has come from more than a decade of a bewilderingly complex civil war in which millions have died. First, neighboring Uganda and Rwanda supported a rebel force under Laurent Kabila that overthrew longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. Soon after, Kabila fell out with his backers, and later Uganda and Rwanda fell out with each other. Before long, they and five other nearby nations had troops on Congo’s soil, in alliance either with the shaky national government in Kinshasa or with a mushrooming number of rival ethnic warlords, particularly here in the mineral-rich east. Those foreign soldiers are almost all gone now, but some fighting between the government and remaining rebel groups continues. For two weeks in June, I had the chance to observe the war’s effects, with the best of possible traveling companions: Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, whose reports have been an authoritative source of information on the country for years.

No one has been harder hit than Congo’s women, for almost all the warring factions have used rape as a calculated method of sowing terror. An hour and a half southwest of Goma on bone-jolting roads stand several low buildings of planks and adobe; small bleating goats wander about and a cooking fire burns on one dirt floor. There is no electricity. A sign reads Maison d’Écoute (Listening House). The office of the forty-two-year-old director, whom I will call Rebecca Kamate, extends from the side of one of the buildings; its other three walls are of thin green tarpaulin with a UNICEF emblem, through which daylight filters. The floor is gravel. Kamate pulls out a hand-written ledger to show to Anneke, her colleague Ida Sawyer, and me. Ruled columns spread across the page: date, name, age of the victim, and details—almost all are gang rapes, by three to five armed men. Since the center started, it has registered 5,973 cases of rape. The ages of the victims just since January range from two to sixty-five. On the ledger’s most recent page, the perpetrators listed include three different armed rebel groups—plus the Congolese national army.

“What pushed me into this work,” says Kamate, speaking softly in a mixture of Swahili and hesitant French, “is that I am also one who was raped.” This happened a decade ago; the rapists were from the now-defunct

The Horror, The Horror: a review of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Jeffrey Gettleman, May 2011
New Republic

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
By Jason K. Stearns
(PublicAffairs, 380 pp., $28.99)

The history of Congo is the history of mass murder. What is going on today—with rebels, government soldiers, and armed groups from neighboring countries raping and slaughtering Congolese civilians—is a continuation of the ruthlessness that has been embedded in this country for more than a hundred years. It began in the 1880s, when King Leopold II of Belgium turned this abundantly fertile expanse in the center of Africa into his own personal fiefdom, murdering and enslaving the population in order to collect as much ivory and rubber as humanly possible. The whip-wielding Belgian administrators who followed were hardly any better, and an ill-prepared Congo stumbled toward independence in 1960. Then, thanks to American meddling, it produced the most corrupt continent’s most corrupt leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, who guzzled pink champagne and feasted on fresh cakes flown in from Paris while his people wasted away. When he was overthrown in 1997, Congo plunged into a bloodbath that sucked in many of its neighbors. It became—and remains—one of the worst wars in modern history, a truly continental disaster that has killed millions of people.

In Congo’s war, battles between soldiers are incredibly rare. Instead, gratuitous massacres of civilians and flamboyant cruelty are the norm. It is difficult not to be hyperbolic when describing this country—the vastness, the mineral riches, the depravity are all off the charts. I have traveled there more than a dozen times and the stories that I have collected stay with me. I have spoken to men who have been pinned down on their stomachs in cassava fields and gang-raped. I have met a little girl whose lips were sawed off by lunatic rebels; you could see her teeth when her mouth was closed. I have stepped over freshly dug graves, one crumbly mound after another, stretching deep into the jungle, marking where hundreds of people were clubbed to death in a massacre that took weeks to come to light because that particular patch of Congo, like so much of the country, is totally cut off, without phones, roads, or any vestiges of modernity. Last fall I met a very gaunt, whispery woman who said she was in a lot of pain. She had been gang-raped as well. Her name was Anna. She was eighty years old.

Anna lives in a village just up the road from a heavily fortified U.N. peacekeeping base. But that meant little, and points to another alarming problem in Congo: nobody seems to be able to help this place. Hundreds of women were raped right under the U.N.’s nose in a three-day rebel rampage last summer that, again, had no discernible strategic purpose other than the terrorizing of innocent people. Congo is now considered “the rape capital of the world,” with hundreds of thousands of women, children, and grown men having been victimized. The United Nations has invested billions in trying to protect Congolese civilians, but it continues to fail. Hillary Clinton paid a special visit to eastern Congo, the most war-wracked part of the country, in 2009. Obama himself has railed against the mass rapes. Countless European ministers have jetted in and out, vowing to end the impunity. But the killings and the rapes go on.