LUVUNGI, Democratic Republic of Congo — Four armed men barged into Anna Mburano’s hut, slapped the children and threw them down. They flipped Mrs. Mburano on her back, she said, and raped her, repeatedly.
It did not matter that dozens of United Nations peacekeepers were based just up the road. Or that Mrs. Mburano is around 80 years old.
“Grandsons!” she yelled. “Get off me!”
As soon as they finished, they moved house to house, along with hundreds of other marauding rebels, gang-raping at least 200 women.
What happened in this remote, thatched-roof village on July 30 and continued for at least three more days has become a searing embarrassment for the United Nations mission in Congo. Despite more than 10 years of experience and billions of dollars, the peacekeeping force still seems to be failing at its most elemental task: protecting civilians.
The United Nations’ blue-helmets are considered the last line of defense in eastern Congo, given that the nation’s own army has a long history of abuses, that the police are often invisible or drunk and that the hills are teeming with rebels.
But many critics contend that nowhere else in the world has the United Nations invested so much and accomplished so little. What happened in Luvungi, with nearby peacekeepers failing to respond to a village under siege, is similar to a massacre in Kiwanja in 2008, when rebels killed 150 people within earshot of a United Nations base.
“Congo is the U.N.’s crowning failure,” said Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” whose advocacy group, V-Day, has been working with Congolese women for years.
She blamed poor management, bad communication and racism. “If the women being raped were the daughters or wives or mothers of the power elites,” she said, “I can promise you this war would have ended about 12 years ago.”
United Nations officials admitted that the peacekeepers failed to respond fast enough to Luvungi, though they said the primary responsibility fell on the Congolese Army, which continues to be in grievous disarray.
“I felt personally guilty and guilty toward the people I met there,” said Atul Khare, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, who recently visited Luvungi. “They told me, ‘We’ve been raped, we’ve been brutalized, give us peace and security.’ Unfortunately, I said, that is something I cannot promise.”
Within peacekeeping circles, Congo is becoming known as “the African equivalent of Afghanistan,” said Annika Hilding-Norberg, a director at the Peace Operations Training Institute in Virginia, because of the conflict’s enduring violence and complexity.
Luvungi, a village of about 2,000 people, is a crucible where so many of Congo’s intractable problems converged: the scramble for minerals; the fragmentation of rebel groups; the perverse incentives among armed groups to commit atrocities to bolster their negotiating strength; the poverty that keeps villages cut off and incommunicado; and the disturbing fact that in Congo’s wars, the battleground is often women’s bodies. United Nations officials call the sexual violence in Congo the worst in the world.
A sense of menace hangs over this entire area, even the government-controlled outposts.
And people in the Luvungi area are now taking no chances. After the rapes, the United Nations set up a small base here, and just the presence of 20 or so peacekeepers in an abandoned mud-walled cinema draws countless refugees from surrounding areas to camp out at night around them.
During escorted trips to markets, thousands of villagers trudge up the hills behind a handful of Indian peacekeepers in trucks, begging the peacekeepers to drive “pole, pole” — or “slowly, slowly” — so as not to leave the slightest gap or opportunity for armed men to drop down from the jungle wall.
This area is spectacularly rich in gold, tin ore and fertile land, which is partly why it has been so bitterly contested by rebel groups and renegade army divisions. Surging brown rivers slice through the jungle, which is decorated with pink hibiscus flowers and birds of paradise. Rumbling up a road here is like driving through a greenhouse.
In mid-July, the Congolese Army contingent stationed in Luvungi suddenly pulled out, leaving the people here unguarded. The United Nations later learned that the soldiers had marched off to Bisie, where there is a huge tin ore mine — and illegal taxes to be extorted.
“This place was a total void,” said Maj. Radha Krishnan, an Indian peacekeeper.
Shortly after the rapes that month, the government ordered mines in eastern Congo temporarily closed, to starve armed groups of income. But the government does not control many of the mines or, for that matter, much of the area.
“The government’s able to dominate only the road,” explained Lt. Col. R. D. Sharma. “The rest,” he said, sweeping his hand over the treetops, “is the negative forces.”
The negative forces stormed into Luvungi on Friday, July 30, around 8 p.m. According to United Nations reports there were around 300 men, a mix of Rwandan rebels who have been terrorizing eastern Congo for years and fighters from a new Congolese rebel group, Mai Mai Cheka, which has been vying for attention as the government tries to absorb more rebels into the army.
Paradoxically enough, the effort to integrate certain rebel groups into the Congolese Army — intended to help stabilize the region — may have supplied a motivation for the rapes, analysts say. The more fearsome and powerful an armed group can appear, the more concessions it can extract in negotiations.
“These guys are trying to boost their ranks, to colonel or general,” said Lt. Hamisi Delfonte, a police officer in Walikale, about a two-hour drive from Luvungi.
The other day, several government soldiers suddenly unshouldered their rifles, clicked off their safeties and started chasing a man in camouflage pants through the middle of town. All heads swiveled in the same direction. Children broke away. “They’re going to kill that guy,” someone said.
But the soldiers did not shoot, and it was soon clear why. The fleeing man was an army major who had just pulled the pin on his grenade. It all stemmed from a dispute over 50 cents. The man was eventually talked down and arrested.
The Indian peacekeepers at the base nearest Luvungi, in Kibua, about 11 miles away, said that they started hearing reports of an attack on the following Sunday, but that they had been tricked many times before. Often, truck drivers claim a certain area is under attack, the peacekeepers said, when in fact they simply want a United Nations escort to the next town to ensure that no one steals their minerals.
Because there is no cellphone service in the area or electricity, it is not always simple to know when there is an attack. The United Nations, which has around 18,000 peacekeepers in Congo, is now trying to install solar-powered high-frequency radios in some villages.
On Aug. 2, that Monday, the peacekeepers agreed to escort truck drivers through Luvungi. Indian officers said that they saw ripped-up mattresses and clothes strewn along the road — evidence of looting — but that the villagers did not say anything about mass rapes.
“Sometimes,” Colonel Sharma said, “the women here are ashamed to tell a soldier, especially a male soldier, that they’ve been raped. And we don’t have any female soldiers.”
Several women in Luvungi said that after they were raped, the rebels hollered into the night, as if they were celebrating. Mrs. Mburano lay bleeding on her floor, listening.
“I know, I still look sick,” she said, though her cloudy eyes tried to smile as she spoke. “Just a few vegetables, that’s all I’ve eaten, since I was demolished.”
Tickets are available for a special 5PM screening of TIBET IN SONG followed by a discussion with V-Day Founder/Artistic Director Eve Ensler, this Sunday, October 3rd at the Cinema Village, NYC
TIBET IN SONG is both a celebration of traditional Tibetan folk music and a harrowing journey into the past fifty years of cultural repression inside Chinese controlled Tibet. Choephel, a former Tibetan political prisoner, weaves a story of beauty, pain, brutality and resilience, introducing Tibet to the world in a way never before seen on film.
Tickets are available online and at the box office, including reduced priced tickets for students and seniors.
The New York premiere of Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames about the life and views of the Jungian analyst, is followed by a conversation between spiritual activist Andrew Harvey and V-Day Founder/Artistic Director Eve Ensler.
Through the use of stunning animation from Academy Award®-winning animator Faith Hubley, and with insight from esteemed author and mystic Andrew Harvey, Marion’s inner and outer lives are woven together, transmitting a core truth of what it is to be human.
Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames
Sunday, October 31
3:00 pm ET
$25 includes admission to the exhibitions before the program
Rubin Museum Of Art
150 West 17th Street, New York, New York 10011
On October 1st, Eve will join members of the Congolese Diaspora of the United States for a major Congo peace rally in front of the United Nations.
“The time has come for us Congolese to be heard on what has always touched our hearts for quite a long time: the recognition of more than 6 million dead, hundreds of thousands of women and girls brutally raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo while the international community and the United Nations looked elsewhere.”
-Congolese Diaspora of the United States
The purpose for rally is to put pressure on the UN to release the final and unaltered report that cites the implication of Rwanda in crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo between the years 1993-2003.
Meeting Point: The Intersection of Park Ave & 34th St. Across from UN.
Landing Point: 42nd Street & 1st Avenue
Starting Time : 9:30 AM ET
Rally Ending : 4:30 PM ET
Now that a mark-up has been scheduled, your help in getting it passed is needed now more then ever! Send letters and emails, make calls and use social media to urge Members of Congress to pass the I-VAWA!
JOIN US for a very special benefit performance of Swimming Upstream at the Apollo Theater in NYC. Due to the support of a very special donor, V-Day is able to offer a limited discount to our activists and organizers!
BUY YOUR TICKETS by 6PM ET Friday, September 10th and receive 30 – 50% off!*
50% off $250 seats – includes entry to the after party with the cast and Eve
Directed by Eve Ensler and featuring Tony Award winners Shirley Knight and LaChanze, Troi Bechet, Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, Anne-Liese Juge Fox, Karen-kaia Livers, and singers Michaela A. Harrison and Leslie Blackshear Smith**
New ticket prices: $21.00, $38.50, $73.50, $128.00. For more information please visit
In a huge blow to groups that provide sexual violence survivor services and prevention programs across the city, the New York City Council has eliminated all of its funding for rape crisis programs, as well as for the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault.
V-Day urges you to write to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to demand that this funding be reinstated so that these important community programs can continue with the city’s support:
UNITED NATIONS — Approximately 500 women were raped in eastern Congo in July and August, demonstrating that both rebel militias and government troops used sexual violence as a weapon, two senior United Nations officials said Tuesday.
Since United Nations officials first disclosed late last month that large numbers of women had been gang-raped, the number reported has grown, to 242 victims from at least 150 concentrated in 13 villages in North Kivu Province, including 28 minors.
But Atul Khare, the deputy head of peacekeeping and the senior official sent from United Nations headquarters to investigate, told the Security Council on Tuesday that at least 257 more women had been raped elsewhere in North Kivu and South Kivu Provinces, for a total of at least 499 victims.
The latest victims include 21 girls between 7 and 21 years old, and six men, he said.
“Our actions were not adequate, resulting in unacceptable brutalization of the population of the villages of the area,” he said of the peacekeeping mission, while noting that ultimately the protection of civilians was the job of the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Over 15,000 rapes were reported annually in both 2008 and 2009, Mr. Khare said. The latest reported include 10 rapes carried out in August by government soldiers, attacks that have been referred to a military prosecutor.
The Security Council will remain focused on the issue to try to better understand the underlying causes, said Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations. The rapes occur in villages near the transit routes for the lucrative trade in illegally extracted minerals.
Margot Wallstrom, who leads a new United Nations office concentrating on sexual violence in armed conflict, told the Council that the rapes in the villages in North Kivu “were not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of widespread systematic rape and pillage.”
She cited horrific accounts from women attacked around Kibua, a village in North Kivu, that militiamen shoved their hands inside women’s sexual organs to look for hidden gold and that the village was surrounded so that no one could run away.
Both United Nations officials said that the organization must work harder to bring the perpetrators or their commanding officers to trial. They also said that the United Nations must be more active in trying to prevent rapes as soon as they hear that rebel fighters are on the move.
The first reports of clashes came in late July, but it took weeks for word of the large number of rapes to emerge.
United Nations peacekeepers are stationed about 20 miles away from where the rapes took place, but none visited until Aug. 2, when a patrol passed through one village. United Nations officials said no villagers had come forward initially about the rapes.
But an e-mail sent within United Nations agencies on July 30, as the attack was unfolding, indicates that United Nations officials knew that rebels were in the area and that at least one woman had reportedly been raped.
Photos by Mr. Abid Naqvi, Director Operations, during his assessment visit to Charsaddah District
Purpose of the visit: To assess post flood situation in district charsaddah – living conditions of affected families especially women and children in the camps.
Traces of destruction started appearing while moving on motorway towards Charssadah via Ghazi-Tarbella-Sawabi-Charssadha. Upon entering Charrsadha a foul smell welcomed us. The surrounding situation was worse than anticipated. People were in a miserable condition state and helplessness. Women and children were the most affected. AMAL team visited following locations i.e. Faqeer Abad Tent Camp, Government Primary School No. 2 – Babrra, Post Graduate College Charssadha, Bashirabad – Khushali Pull, on the bank of River Swat, Village Manzoori – Bank of River Swat and Weeno Garhee, Sar Daryab – River Kabul.
Brief findings of the assessment of these four locations are (which are similar to all the affected areas in the province) :
20 million displaced – only 8 million have received any kind of aid
Majority of the affectees are living in camps provided by some individuals / donors and schools. Over 900 families are surviving in these locations and approximately 600 of them are women and children. They have been receiving (intermittently) relief goods from NGOs and individuals but women / children specific supplies are always missing. Due to the strict “Pardah” culture of the Province, women cannot ask for their essentials and have no permission to go out of their filthy smelly camps / rooms which are packed to capacity (average 5-6 families per camp / room) with no electricity. They are facing shortage of food, water, hygiene items, beddings, clothes, baby food, utensils separate toilets and fresh air. One of the respondents told that a woman delivered two babies few days back but due to the shortage of facilities and conservative culture, she was not treated properly which resulted in death of one baby and her own condition was very critical. Some pregnant women are also present in the camps. One woman had a surgery just before the floods, her wounds were oozing and infected. The environment is entirely infected with flies and mosquitoes.
Due to the restricted and unhealthy claustrophobic environment, women and children are most vulnerable to diseases and absence of lady doctors are adding more to it. Following common diseases were reported in the area, Scabies – skin infection, Gastro (Enteritis) – especially in children, Diarrhea, depression (mostly in women) and anger (men), as a result of displacement and the miseries in camps, blood pressure, sore throat and eyes infection – red, water and itching.
Relief goods are handed over to the “Men” of camps and they are considered the “Owners”. Based on these findings, AMAL team has prepared “women and children focused” food, hygiene and supplies kits and AMAL team will ensure that these are received by the women in the camps, not their husbands or brothers. AMAL is also struggling to ensure that the men in these locations understand the special needs of their women folk and allow doctors and workers easy access to them.
AMAL’s first distribution is taking place in these locations on Saturday, August 28, 2010
Bald, brave and beautiful: Those words can’t begin to capture the remarkable Eve Ensler. She sat down with me last week, in the midst of her battle with uterine cancer, to talk about New Orleans and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eve, the author of the hit play “The Vagina Monologues” and the creator of V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls, told me how “cancer has been a huge gift.”
Eve’s moving essay “Congo Cancer” begins, “Some people may think that being diagnosed with uterine cancer, followed by extensive surgery that led to a month of debilitating infections, rounded off by months of chemotherapy, might get a girl down. But, in truth, this has not been my poison.” The poison, she went on, was the epidemic of rape, torture and violence against women and girls in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Eve wrote “The Vagina Monologues” in 1996 as a celebration of women’s bodies and women’s empowerment. “When I did the play initially,” she told me, “everywhere I went on the planet, women would literally line up after the show … 90 to 95 percent of the women were lining up to tell me how they had been raped or battered or incested or abused. … I had no idea that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime. Suddenly this door opened for me.”
Eve began producing the play to raise funds for rape crisis hot lines and women’s organizations across the U.S. “We came up with this idea of V-Day,” she told me, “which was Ending Violence Day, Vagina Day–reclaiming Valentine’s Day as a day of kindness and good will to women. … We are now in 130 countries. Last year, there were 5,000 events in 1,500 or 1,600 places. It’s raised close to $80 million, that has all gone into local communities.”
The V-Day movement brought Eve to some of the most desperate places on earth–Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and post-Katrina New Orleans. She spent a year with women in New Orleans, compiling their descriptions of their lives and the impact of Hurricane Katrina into a series of monologues. It’s called “Swimming Upstream.” Unbelievably, in the middle of her chemotherapy, Eve is directing two special performances in mid-September, in New Orleans and at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
Eastern Congo, a war-ravaged region of the world’s most impoverished country, is where Eve and V-Day have been devoting most of their recent efforts. Since 1996, hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, victims of what V-Day calls femicide. Last month, Rwandan and Congolese rebels took over villages in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and gang-raped almost 200 women and five young boys. The rapes occurred between July 30 and Aug. 3 within miles of a U.N. peacekeeping base, and went unreported for three weeks.
These rapes are brutal, leaving the victims with deep wounds and fistulae that require surgery. V-Day has been working with Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the only facility in the region where the women can receive adequate treatment. V-Day is also building a woman-controlled safe zone attached to the hospital called “The City of Joy.”
Eve said the women themselves developed the plans for the City of Joy, “a place where they could heal, where they could be trained, where they could become leaders, where they had time and a respite to rebuild themselves and redirect their energies towards their communities.” If all goes well with her own treatment, she will be joining them to open the City of Joy in February.
The work, Eve told me, defines what she calls a “kind of three-way V between Haiti, the Congo and New Orleans.”
With a scarf on her head, having lost her hair during cancer treatments, she was days away from starting her fourth round of chemotherapy. I asked her how she does it.
“The women of Congo saved my life,” she said. “Every day I get up, and I think to myself, I can keep going. If a woman in Congo gets up this morning after she’s had her insides eviscerated, what problem do I really have? And I think of how they dance. Every time I go to the Congo, they dance and they sing and they keep going, in spite of being forgotten and forsaken by the world. And I think to myself, I have to get better. I have to live to see the day when the women of Congo are free, because if those women are free, women throughout the world will be free and will get to continue.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
Tickets are available for a special 5PM screening of 
The New York premiere of Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames about the life and views of the Jungian analyst, is followed by a conversation between spiritual activist Andrew Harvey and V-Day Founder/Artistic Director Eve Ensler.
