Rape and Genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
A Globe With Their Eyes "Wide Shut"
Women screamed all around me. Some clutched their babies while others held onto each other. With weapons in hand, men entered the open structure and randomly grabbed women, brutally raping them as the rest of us watched frozen in fear. In the chaos, I had not noticed the man suddenly standing in front of me. The machete he held was far less intimidating than the scowl on his face. He yelled at me in a dialect I was not familiar with and even though I could not understand what he was saying, I knew what was about to happen.
I awoke in a cold sweat. Barely able to catch my breath as I realized I had been dreaming. The mere thought of being raped caused me to hyperventilate as I struggled to arouse myself from a sleeping state. My relief was short lived as I remembered that in some part of the world, a woman very much like myself was facing the same fear. There was one essential difference between that woman and myself—she would not be dreaming and eliminating her fear would require more than simply opening her eyes. Eliminating her fears would entail opening the eyes of the entire global community.
Discourse of human security as it relates to women appears to avoid the “G” word—genocide. This is perhaps because the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (Convention) fails to identify systematic sexual based violence as an act of genocide. Various threats to human security are gender specific. Rape, forced impregnation, maternal mortality rates and sexual
slavery are components of human insecurity which have to be viewed through a gendered lens to recognize “who is affected and how, and what specific forms of protection or assistance are needed by whom.” A 2002 Report, Women, Peace and Security, issued by the United Nations highlights gender specific human insecurity concerns such as female genital mutilation, sexual violence as strategic and tactical weapon of war, reproductive health, access to safe abortions, prenatal healthcare and the disproportionate rate of HIV/AIDS cases among women.
Visibly Forgotten: African Women and Genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
African women encounter a different form of invisibility. The world is privy to the sexual-specific violence experienced by women in various African countries. While many groups, both regional and international seek to redress on behalf of African women, the sexually remiss nature of international legislation, laws and policies leave these women without any legal recourse. In many cases, statutes, policies and recommendations aimed to prevent violence against women allow “technical loopholes.” That is to say, the wording and actual application of such documents and policies fails to grant African women real and specific protection from sexually specific violence. While the sexually specific threats to human security are prevalent in many African countries, the examination of all of them would require a book-length undertaking. As such, I will primarily focus on the threat to sexual security as it relates to women in the country now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
A considerable number of news outlets report the increase of heinous violence in the DRC. With a population of approximately 66 million people, the DRC is the third largest country in Africa. “A vast country with immense natural resources (diamonds, cobalt, coltan, copper and gold ), the Democratic Republic of Congo has been at the centre of what could be termed Africa’s world war,” the effects of which perpetuate violence within the country. To date, more people have been killed due to conflict in the DRC than in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur combined. Continuity is not a concept known to citizens of the DRC, a country plagued by coup attempts, mutinies, regime conversions and name changes. Although violence in the DRC was present long before 1994, it is then that the DRC was also forced to confront spillover violence resulting from conflict in the neighboring country of Rwanda. After the assassination of Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994, ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsis resulted in the deaths of approximately 800,000 Tutsis. Rwandans fleeing violence filed into what was then Zaire. The mass exodus included soldiers and Hutu militiamen known as the Interhamwe, a group responsible for perpetuating the violence in Rwanda, the Interhamwe would seize the opportunity to regroup and recruit. The then Tutsi controlled army of Rwanda responded by invading Zaire. In a reverse exodus, hundreds of thousands crossed back into Rwanda. Those who stayed in Zaire were pursued and massacred.
Who Is Keeping Our Sisters?
Millions died during the heightened regional conflict that ensued from 1997-2002. A 2002 peace agreement did little to quell the violence. By the end of 2003, rebel groups recommenced violent attacks. One study states that rebels “have nowhere to go, they have nothing to lose, and with the advent of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, they feel they can benefit only by continuing the violence and forestalling an uncertain but likely ominous end for themselves.”
In the midst of political conflict, innocent people are forced to deal with very personal consequences. Those perpetuating the violence in the DRC did not, and do not restrict their attacks to political actors. The victims are often those who are most vulnerable. Women and children, for various reasons, are perhaps the most accessible groups to prey upon. In the same way the Hutu-Tutsi conflict resurfaced in the DRC, so did the occurrence of massive sexual violence against women and girls.
Despite a myriad of political disturbances, one thing remains constant for the women of the conflict torn DRC—terrorization through rape. No female is exempt. Girls as young as three and women as old as seventy-five are victimized by rape. As much as 90% of the women in some villages have been raped. In a one year time span (2002-2003), the number of rape victims seen at a hospital in eastern DRC (Panzi Hospital) increased by 444 percent. Staff at the hospital note that not all cases are new cases. Marion Pratt outlines the complexity of reasons behind rapes occurring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in detailing the various categories of rape:
1) Punitive rape (used to punish or elicit silence and control
2) Status rape (occurring as a result of acknowledged differences in rank)
3) Ceremonial rape (undertaken as part of socially sanctioned rituals)
4) Exchange rape (when genital contact is used as a bargaining tool)
5) Theft rape (involuntary abduction of individuals as slaves and prostitutes)
6) Survival rape (when young women become involved with older men to secure good and/or services needed to survive)
All six categories of rape listed above are instances of sexual insecurity which are almost exclusively directed towards women. The coercion component of survival rape for African women is much like the choice African American women face when confronted with public assistance programs requiring sterilization to qualify for benefits. Without regard to the type of rape, the stigma of rape in the DRC has consequences for the entire community. Adding to the emotional abuse is the fact that family members, including husbands and
brothers, are often forced to watch as their loved ones are raped. The consequences are grave. Unmarried girls have “little prospect for getting married, their family is deeply shamed by association, and parents will not receive a dowry for their daughters.” Children born as products of rape are ostracized and labeled “children of hate” and are often rejected by their mothers. Female victims left without any means of economic support face homelessness as a consequence of losing the financial support of their husbands and families.
Sexually transmitted infections and diseases are prevalent in areas with such high occurrences of rape. The HIV rate of rape victims has been estimated as high as 27 percent in eastern DRC. The probability of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases increases during violent attacks of rape due to tearing of vaginal tissue. Approximately 50 percent are infected with venereal diseases (i.e. syphilis). Given that these women do not have access to antibiotics and antiretroviral drugs, “sexual assaults all too often become death sentences.”
No amount of statistical data could convey the experience of female rape victims in the DRC. Their own accounts provide a chilling view of the nightmares they encounter daily.
“One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”
“We walked and walked in the forest carrying very heavy loads…Often there was fighting. Every man raped me.”
“What would be the point in making a report? The man would never be punished.”
“They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me, one after the other. Then they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted.”
Women in the DRC are mercilessly brutalized. A doctor in Bukavu reported seeing women whose genitals had been cut off during attacks and women who had been shot in the vagina following a sexual assault. In a country with scarce economic resources, one can hardly expect that these women have access to resources to deal with the psychological toll of such violence. These women are victimized repeatedly. First, they are victims of rape and then when they are subsequently shunned as a result of the rape. Lastly, the women of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are victimized by the international community that fails to address the horrific systematic threat to the sexual security of women in the DRC. By failing to act to prevent or punish those perpetuating the systematic serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (Convention, Article 2b) to African women, the international community is guilty of violating Article 3e of the Convention which identifies complicity of genocide as a criminal act.
The concept of systematic rape as a method of genocide has yet to be fully accepted by the international community. The reasoning is two-fold. Women are not a protect class under the Convention and rape is not specifically identified as a serious bodily or mental harm. The same violence enacted based on race, religion and ethnicity would be prohibited under the Convention.
A case currently before the International Criminal Court (Court) might give women in the DRC the ability to seek legal recourse as victims of genocide by rape. The president of Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, is currently facing charges of rape as a method of genocide.
No female is Exempt
The court’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has filed other charges as well, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and “mass murder as genocide.” But the groundbreaking charge is rape as genocide, which relies on two lesser-known ways of destroying a people: “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Prosecuting the crime of rape under these particular formulations is unprecedented for the International Criminal Court. There were mass rapes in Rwanda in 1994, for instance, but many of the victims were quickly killed as part of the overall genocide. In Darfur, many rape victims survive, but they suffer grievous harm to their bodies, minds and ethnic identities that can lead to a genocidal result. Despite rulings from earlier Rwanda and Bosnia war crimes tribunals that offer guidance, the relative novelty and complexity of rape-as-genocide cases may impel the judges to stick to more familiar war crimes terrain. But the judges only have to find reasonable grounds to include the rape-as-genocide charges on the Bashir warrant. They need not establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard applied at trial.
A finding of systematic rape as genocide would serve two purposes. The first would allow the violence against African women to be classified as genocide, thereby compelling the international community to act to prevent future occurrences of this heinous crime. Secondly, the finding of rape as genocide would introduce the idea of sexually specific crimes in the discourse of genocide which could subsequently compel an amendment to the Convention establishing women as a protected class against genocide.
Examples are BBC, CBS, CNN, New York Times,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cg.html
Coltan is a key component in the manufacturing of cellular phones
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/country_profiles/1076399.stm
Cooper, 2008
Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Congo-Léopoldville, Congo-Kinshasa, and Zaire have all been names of what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Tran, 2008
Pratt, 9
Ibid.
Ibid.
Pratt, 12
Pratt, 12
Ibid. at 15
Goodwin, 2
Gettleman, 1
Brittain, 595
Ibid. at 596
Goodwin, 1
Brittain, 598
Scheffer, 2008
Ibid.
Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide applies genocide to national, racial, ethnic or religious groups.
Women, Peace and Security, 200
December 13, 2008 1:47 pm 2 Comments
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By Michelle, December 13, 2008 @ 7:28 pm
ohh, tagged for reading! Important important stuff.
By Tekeral A. Thurman, December 19, 2008 @ 8:04 pm
Girl I’m trying to read all of it but seems so longgggg.I’m going to write you after I finish the whole thing for real..