Pizza Diavola

Update: The “Contact your representatives” link at the Amnesty International link in my last post doesn’t work, so please use the form at CARE (via Melissa).

SF Chronicle: Film captures rapists and their victims in Congo (2008/04/05): a review of The Greatest Silence that discusses the film, its content, and the process of making it.

Why, Jackson wanted to know, if her rape was considered news, does the huge wave of Congolese atrocities go unreported and unacknowledged?

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Jackson said she tried for two years without success to raise funds for “The Greatest Silence.” The subject made people uncomfortable, she found; it was easier for them to look the other way. Finally, she went last May to Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, and then to the eastern city of Bukavu.

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The rape epidemic isn’t entirely senseless, Jackson found. “This is a resource war, pure and simple.” Congo is rich in diamonds, gold and coltan, or columbite-tantalite, a metal used in cell phones, DVD players and computers. The 10-year civil war, which has claimed 4 million lives, is a fight for access to those minerals, and the sexual violence is part of that fight. By raping and terrorizing women, the military maintains a heightened climate of instability and fear.

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Being a rape victim, Jackson said, she had a built-in connection with the women she met and interviewed. She brought them photos of herself with family members, told them about the night she was assaulted.

In most cases, the women had never spoken publicly. Given the chance, Jackson said, “they would literally line up to talk to me until there was no light. Just to have someone listen to them without judgment.”

Jackson spent four months in the Congo altogether, spread over three visits. She went to villages where virtually all the women had been raped. She saw Panzi Hospital, which treats victims whose vaginas were brutalized and who suffer from permanent loss of bladder and bowel control.

“I wanted to find rapists who would talk to me,” she says in the film. Despite “huge apprehensions,” she and her translator drove six hours into a jungle conflict zone where men in hooded jackets held rifles and arrogantly justified their deeds.

“I rape because of a need,” one says. “After that I feel like a man.” Another speaks of rape in terms of expedience: “I have no time to negotiate. I have no time to love her.”

Jackson remembers that day: “The single most chilling moment was when I had just finished interviewing the rapists. They just melted back into the trees, and I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Who is their next victim going to be?’ There was no one there to arrest them; they were off to claim their next victim.”

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She wants the people of Congo to see it, and is having the film translated into Lingala, the language of western Congo, and Swahili, the language of eastern Congo. “I want to do local screenings, probably with generators and hanging sheets on the sides of buildings, in the villages where I filmed.

“I feel a real responsibility to these women. So many of them said, ‘Please, take our story to the world.’ “