Pizza Diavola

Via Melissa at Shakesville: SheCodes at Black Women Vote! is running a blogswarm today to raise awareness of the normalization of rape in the Congo.

Searching through the archives of the Guardian, NYT, and FT reveals a disappointing lack of coverage of the rape epidemic. The most recent articles are about Lisa Jackson’s new film, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a documentary that aired on HBO last week. And what coverage that is–rather than discussing the topic of the film, which is the widespread rape of Congolese women, NYT film reviewer Ginia Bellafante (NYT 2008/04/0 chooses to focus exclusively on Jackson’s personal history as a victim of gang rape and in a bizarre twist on victim-blaming, uses it to excoriate Jackson for “her unfortunate wish to relate” to the rape victims she interviews. In a review of a documentary about rape, Bellafante includes one line about the “hundreds of thousands of Congolese women” who are raped, and focuses the rest of her article on impugning Jackson’s motive for raising awareness of human atrocities and undermining Jackson’s credibility. In other words, the only recent article about the rape epidemic in the Congo doesn’t discuss the rape epidemic at all. Instead, it attacks a rape victim for wanting to raise awareness about a rape epidemic; perhaps this is another twist on the idea that rape victims can’t be objective and need to hide their experiences so as not to make other people uncomfortable?

Looking further back in the news archives, there is silence about the rape epidemic until November 2007. The Economist has an article from November 15, A humanitarian disaster unfolds

The conflict [in Congo] has taken on another dimension of brutality too. Women have been raped on an unprecedented scale, in the thousands. According to experts, rape is being used as a weapon of war. Such are the scale and violence of the attacks in eastern Congo, claims Yakin Erturk, the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women, that they constitute a war crime. Rape is being carried out by all sides and, worryingly, by civilians too.

On November 12, the Guardian reported, Hundreds of thousands of women raped for being on the wrong side:

“This thing of rape,” said Colonel Edmond Ngarambe … “I can’t deny that happens. We are human beings. But it’s not just us. The Mai Mai, the government soldiers who are not paid, the Rastas do the same thing. And some people sent by our enemies do it to cause anger against us.”

The colonel’s words lay bare a brutal reality about the wretched use of rape as an instrument of war in the east of the Congo. The growing numbers of women who arrive daily at hospitals as a fresh bout of fighting engulfs the region often have no idea whether their attackers were from the Mai Mai traditional militia, renegade Tutsi soldiers or a group of deserters from an array of armed groups who wear dreadlocks, call themselves the Rastas and specialise in particularly brutal treatment of their victims.

Ngarambe’s comment, “We are human beings,” sends a chill down my spine, because what he’s saying is that he sees raping women as a natural part of being a human being. A male human being, that is. Rape has been used as a genocidal tool of war by so many different sides and is so widespread that it is seen as acceptable, normal behavior toward women. It’s not about raping women who are part of a different ethnic or political group as part of war, it’s about raping women, period.

Tens of thousands of rapes have been recorded by the UN in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu over the past year, but as only a fraction of the women assaulted make it to hospital there is little doubt that the total number of victims runs into hundreds of thousands in recent years.

In towns such as Shabunda it is estimated that seven out of 10 women have been raped. Many are gang-raped or assaulted over several years. Hospitals have treated girls as young as three. Others have been abducted by armed groups as sex slaves and held in holes in the ground or lashed to trees.

Human rights groups say it is not only the scale of the rape that is significant but the brutality that often accompanies it. Hospitals have treated women who have had guns, sticks and tin cans thrust into their vaginas after being raped. Armed men have also cut babies from the bellies of pregnant women after raping them.

No one group is responsible, and it is not only men in uniform who are committing the assaults. Médecins sans Frontières estimates that about two-thirds of rapes are carried out by combatants with armed groups from the Rwandan Hutu rebels and local Tutsi warlords, Mai Mai traditional militia and the Congolese government army. But many assaults are committed by civilian men, particularly in towns where the rule of law has broken down completely.

On October 7, the NYT reported, Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War:

According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

…

While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo’s problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.

“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”

So, what’s going on? Despite the silence in the news, there’s no reason to believe that the violence is decreasing or that the government and the UN are making tangible efforts to fight it. From the same Guardian article,

The largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world of more than 17,000 troops has done little to stop it. Instead, the primary attempt to discourage sexual violence appears on hand-painted murals on walls across the region telling men that it is not manly to rape.

Murals. Hundreds of thousands of women are being raped, mutilated, tortured, and butchered, and the best the UN is doing is painting murals? This is beyond belief. We need to:

• Raise awareness. Educate yourself about what’s going on, write about it at your own blog, write to your officials in Congress, the presidential candidates, your local paper, etc. Erase the mainstream silence around the rape epidemic.
• Contact your senators and representatives and ask them to support the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) (via Washington Post, 2008/04/11):
  

  The bill lays out a powerful international agenda to combat violence against women and girls. Such violence is a critical international development issue that must be addressed in order to achieve prosperity and stability around the world. Amnesty International USA, Family Violence Prevention Fund and Women’s Edge Coalition provided advice on the drafting of the legislation with the input of 150 international and domestic experts.

Some posts with more information and links:

SheCodes: Hunters of black women: mass rape and mutilation in the Congo

Woc PhD: The Greatest Silence Premieres on HBO Tomorrow

Historiann: Rape still a powerful weapon of war

Blog in Solidarity: Congo Rape Epidemic

Jill at Feministe: Blogging for Women in the Congo