Panzi Hospital in eastern Congo contains 350 beds, all of whom were occupied by suffering, traumatized women. The word rape does not suffice to describe the experiences they have undergone. Doctors working in the Congo have coined a new term for the wounds they saw in these brutalized women: vaginal destruction. All of them have been raped, some with bayonets, others with pieces of wood, and still others have been shot. Their ages range from 3 years to 75 years old; neither the young nor the old have been spared. The level of violence used against these women is unprecedented. They are victims of the fighting that occurred between armed militias, including one organized by the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda, and government troops. Despite the presence of 17,000 United Nations peacekeeping troops, the number of women subjected to sexual violence has increased over the past few months.
Rape as a weapon of war is not novel, unfortunately. Greek and Roman troops raped women in towns they had conquered. In 1099 C.E., when the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem, countless Muslim and Jewish women—and even some Christian women—were raped. In the modern era, Serbian troops raped Bosnian women to crush the morale of the Bosnians; Hutu marauders raped Tutsi women in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Currently, the janjaweed militias continue to rape young girls and women in Darfur. In these situations, rape occurs not only to cow the women’s communities into submission, but is also used to dishonor the women and is a means of ethnic cleansing.
Yet these war crimes pale when compared to the horrific brutalization of the women in the Congo and the prevalence of rape there. This violence is a methodical destruction of women’s lives, and, as a consequence, the lives of their children, their families, and their communities are torn apart. The number of women affected is staggering: in 2006, in just one province of the Congo, South Kivu province, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported. In some towns, 70% of the women are survivors of sexual assault. Panzi Hospital does not have enough beds to accommodate all of the survivors, some of whom have suffered such terrible damage that they need surgical treatment. There are too many women who need help and not enough organizations to help them.
Gender-based violence is not just about women’s rights, nor is not just a women’s issue. It is about human rights, and it is about what one human being does to another human being. It challenges the ethics that every culture espouses of protecting those members of society who are most vulnerable, which, in many societies, are women and children. Yet the global community has done little to address gender-based violence, especially rape as a weapon of war, despite the fact that it has occurred with increasing brutality in multiple conflicts in the past two decades alone. It was only in 1996 that the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal declared rape a war crime and indicted eight Serbian soldiers and police officers in connection to the rapes of nearly 20,000 Muslim Bosnian women. Although over a decade has passed since this declaration, rape continues to be used as a terror strategy, and there is little that any organization does to prevent it. Even the UNIFEM, a branch of the U.N. dedicated to women’s empowerment and gender equality, remains inadequately equipped to address this concern. It has never achieved the sort of publicity UNICEF has, nor does it have a comparable budget, and as a result, it is ineffective in combating issues such as crimes against humanity.
This past January, the government and the rebel militias in the Congo signed a peace treaty declaring a ceasefire, but very few of these men will address the invisible casualties of the fighting: the women of the Congo. They bear the physical and emotional wounds of war and have experienced the fighting in a way that no man can. The world remains silent about the violence these women suffered. Newspapers carry little information about the situation, reporting recently only that the fighting had ended. Few people have spoken about the fact that rape was used to terrorize and oppress entire communities, and fewer still are trying to help the survivors. Most importantly, few people recognize that while a peace treaty may have been signed, the ramifications of this systematic violence will continue to reverberate in these communities.
The fighting has ended, but for many women, the road to recovery has only begun.
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