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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-clinton-africa17-200…
The secretary of State made an impression with a heartfelt visit to eastern Congo, which is rocked by violence, particularly rape. Some have hope that U.S. efforts can end the conflict.
By Robyn Dixon
Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa – For most of her recent African tour, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sounded much like any visiting foreign official, male or female. Except in Congo.
When Clinton ignored security advice and flew to Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, her focus on the region’s rape crisis resonated with some of the continent’s most powerless people: women.
It wasn’t just that she was the first top-level American official to go to the epicenter of one of the world’s deadliest wars, nor even the U.S. aid money she promised. It was her reaction to victims’ stories of rape — and the hope that she might do something about it.
The conflict in eastern Congo is a toxic mix of jostling militias, ethnic tensions, greed for resource wealth, a tragic colonial history, a predatory army and opportunistic neighbors. Rape is commonly used as a weapon in this war. Although reliable statistics are difficult to come by, it’s estimated that close to 200,000 women have been raped since the conflict began 13 years ago.
In a recent upsurge in violence, an estimated 3,500 women and girls are estimated to have been raped since the beginning of the year. Men and boys also are increasingly victims of sexual assault.
In America, Clinton might have been portrayed as a bit of a shrew in her sharp reaction to a Congolese student’s question about her husband’s thoughts on an issue — a momentary loss of her usual steely control that got so much media coverage that it became the single moment some people remember about her trip.
But women’s rights activists in eastern Congo weren’t talking about that. They were talking about the tears they saw glistening in her eyes Tuesday as she talked to rape victims and heard their horrendous stories of suffering, including a woman who was raped while pregnant and who lost her baby.
Clinton was so warm and compassionate, activists said, they felt they could almost call her Hillary.
Christine Schuler Deschryver, a prominent Congolese activist with the organization VDAY, which fights gender violence in Congo, is cynical after many futile visits from envoys of various countries and organizations.
But Clinton’s visit gave her a renewed sense of hope, said Deschryver, who was one of the activists who met with the secretary of State.
“For the first time in a decade, I have hope again,” she said, speaking by telephone from the city of Bukavu. “The message I gave her first of all, as a woman, not as secretary of State, is that a woman can feel the pain all these women feel.
“I had another image of Mrs. Clinton” before meeting her, Deschryver said, “and I have really discovered a woman with a big heart. I saw in her eyes many times tears. I know she was deeply moved.”
Clinton’s focus on the violent tussle for mineral wealth in the region, not just the victims it creates, was seen by activists as a key part of the message.
John Prendergast, founder of the anti-genocide awareness group Enough Project, said resolving the conflict required a concerted long-term approach.
He said one key was to make more transparent the trade in minerals from the region, including gold, tin, tungsten and tantalum. That way consumers could be sure that their purchases of cellphones, laptops and other electronics in which these metals are often used were not helping fund the war.
The conflict “has devolved into a scramble for one of the richest non-petroleum resources bases in the world. There’s just way too much money to be made,” said Prendergast, who was an Africa analyst in President Bill Clinton’s administration.
He said if America’s top diplomat decided to make stopping the war in Congo a priority, a lot could be achieved.
“When an issue becomes specific and personal to a Cabinet member, it has a better chance of getting the kind of personal attention needed to push through the initiatives that can make a difference,” he said. “I think she’s now personally invested in having some kind of solution in Congo.
“She’s stated her desire is to have an end to the conflict,” he said. “She separated herself from the usual high-level visitors [to Congo] by saying we are doing to deal with it.”
To activists such as Deschryver, Clinton’s visit also inspired hope that female Congolese leaders could play a role in ending the conflict.
Although her initial euphoria over the Clinton visit has faded a little, she remains optimistic that Clinton can make the difference if she continues to push the issue.
“If the U.S. has the will and if they give a very strong warning and say first of all we want to stop the violence, it can have a big impact,” Deschryver said. “I hope that was her aim in coming here. Otherwise in 100 years, we will still be here, beggars depending on other countries.”
An African foreign policy analyst said Clinton hit the right diplomatic notes.
“A little over halfway through the year, both the president, followed up by Secretary of State Clinton, have been to Africa, which is quite a departure from the attention that Africa usually gets,” said Francis Kornegay, analyst with the Institute for Global Dialogue, an independent South African think tank. “I think overall her seven-nation safari has been quite successful.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/africa/12diplo.html?_r=1
GOMA, Congo – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came face to face with the consequences of the brutality in eastern Congo on Tuesday afternoon when she met a Congolese woman who had been gang-raped while she was eight months pregnant.
The fetus died, Mrs. Clinton said, the woman was gravely injured and since there was no hospital nearby, villagers stuffed the woman’s wound with grass to keep her from bleeding to death.
“I’ve been in a lot of very difficult and terrible settings,” Mrs. Clinton said later. “And I was just overwhelmed by what I saw.”
“It is almost impossible to describe the level of suffering,” she said. Eastern Congo’s rape epidemic, she added, “is just horrific.”
Mrs. Clinton used her unprecedented visit – she is the first secretary of state to venture into the war zone here – to unveil a $17 million plan to fight Congo’s stunning levels of sexual violence, a problem she called “evil in its basest form.”
She announced that the American government would train doctors, supply rape victims with video cameras to document violence, send American military engineers to help build facilities and train Congolese police officers, especially female police officers, to crack down on rapists.
“This problem is too big for one country to solve alone,” Mrs. Clinton said after meeting with Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila. Her visit was part of a seven-nation Africa tour intended to strengthen relations with strategic African countries and to use American influence to stop Africa’s wars.
Eastern Congo is home to the worst war on the continent right now, an intensely predatory conflict driven by a mix of ethnic, commercial, nationalist and criminal interests, in which various armed groups often vent their rage against women. The United Nations calls Congo the rape capital of the world and says hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in the past decade. Nothing so far – not 18,000 peacekeepers, not various regional peace treaties, not other high-level diplomatic visits – have stemmed the violence.
Recent Congo-Rwanda military operations along the volatile border may be making things worse. The operations have spawned revenge attacks that have driven more than 500,000 people from their homes. Dozens of villages of have been burned. Hundreds of villagers have been massacred. And countless women, and recently many men, have been raped. Often the rapists are Congolese soldiers.
Mrs. Clinton said she urged the Congolese government to do a better job of protecting its own people and to prosecute offenders in the Congolese military, which is notorious as one of the least disciplined, poorest paid armies anywhere.
“I spoke at length with President Kabila about the steps needed to be taken to protect civilians,” she said. “We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender based violence, and there must be arrests and punishment because that runs counter to peace.”
Mrs. Clinton also addressed some of the conflict’s root causes, including Congo’s illicit mineral trade. In the words of Congo’s foreign minister, who also met with Mrs. Clinton on Tuesday, the country, with its rich trove of diamonds, gold, copper, tin, coltan and other minerals, is a “geological scandal.”
But Congo’s mines are often the unlawful prize of armed groups, and Mrs. Clinton said the world needed to take more steps to regulate the mineral trade to make sure the profits do not end up “in the hands of those who fuel the violence.”
After the official meetings, Mrs. Clinton and her heavily guarded entourage toured a refugee camp on the outskirts of Goma where 18,000 people are camped out on a field of volcanic rock. One of the first people she met was an aid worker who rattled off the problems: malaria, diarrhea, hunger, difficulties breathing because of all the dust, and of course, constant insecurity. The aid worker told Mrs. Clinton that an 8-year-old boy who had strayed out of the camp was raped the other day.
“Really?” Mrs. Clinton asked.
“Really,” he answered.
Then she met Chantal Mapendo, mother of six, who stepped forward from the corridors of long drawn faces that had instantly formed to look at the important white lady with all the sunglassed security guards. Mrs. Clinton visited the camp for 20 minutes. Mrs. Mapendo, whose home area has been plagued by fighting, has been living here for three years.
“Our life is very bad,” Mrs. Mapendo said. “We get raped when we go out and look for food. We want to leave this place and go home.”
Mrs. Clinton nodded. “Thank you for talking with me,” she replied. “I just met with President Kabila and told him we want to help you return home.”
After the camp, she spoke with two rape survivors, including the woman who lost her fetus and nearly bled to death in the bush. Mrs. Clinton then talked with a group of doctors and advocates who specialize in treating victims of sexual violence. Many said they felt abandoned.
“Children are killed, women are raped and the world closes its eyes,” said one woman.
Another called Congo the “soft belly” of Africa, a huge, rugged place with a notoriously inept army that has become a magnet for all the rogue groups in Africa.
A third woman, Christine Schuler-DeSchryver, a well-known anti-rape activist, vented about all the empty promises from the stream of high-ranking visitors who have recently come to eastern Congo, “one more important than the next.”
“In the end, all we got was a pile of business cards,” she said.
She pressed Mrs. Clinton to do more to end the criminally-controlled mineral trade.
“Madame Secretary,” she said, “we want you to be our spokesperson, our voice.”
After five hours on the ground in Goma, Mrs. Clinton climbed back on the plane, this time bound for Nigeria. She seemed drained.
“It was an incredibly emotional experience,” she said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/africa/12diplo.html?ref=global-h…
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and SHARON OTTERMAN
Published: August 11, 2009
GOMA, Congo — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a $17 million plan on Tuesday to fight the widespread sexual violence in eastern Congo, a problem she said was “evil in its basest form.”
Speaking during an unprecedented visit by an American secretary of state to Goma, in the epicenter of Congo’s war-torn east, she said the American government would help train gynecologists, supply rape victims with video cameras to document violence and send military engineers to help train Congolese police officers to crack down on rapists.
“This problem is too big for one country to solve alone,” she said at a round-table meeting here with doctors and human rights advocates.
“I’m not here to leave a business card, but I can’t wave a magic wand either,” she said when human rights workers pressed her for concrete assistance.
Eastern Congo has been awash in bloodshed for more than a decade, and it is now going through another horrific period. Recent Congo-Rwanda military operations along the volatile border have provoked revenge attacks and driven more than 500,000 people from their homes. Dozens of villages of have been burned, hundreds of villagers massacred and countless women raped. Since 1998, more than five million people throughout the in Congo are estimated to have died, and hundreds of thousands of women sexually assaulted. Rapes of men have begun to increase as well.
Mrs. Clinton came here, she said, to shine a light on the civilian deaths and endemic sexual violence, and to call on the government of Congo, whose own soldiers have been implicated in many of the abuses, to do a better job of protecting its own people.
“We are very concerned about civilian casualties: deaths and rapes and other injuries from military action,” she said at a news conference at the governor’s mansion here along the shores of Lake Kivu after a meeting with President Joseph Kabila and other officials.
“I spoke at length with President Kabila about the steps needed to be taken to protect civilians,” she said. “We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender based violence, and there must be arrests and punishment because that runs counter to peace.”
After meeting with the officials, Mrs. Clinton and her entourage drove to the displaced persons camp on the city’s outskirts, where 18,000 people camp on a lava field left behind by a devastating volcanic eruption several years ago. She toured the camp for about 15 minutes, during which she was surrounded by hundreds of people forced to leave their villages by the violence.
One woman, Chantal Mapendo, 32, came up to Mrs. Clinton and told her how she had been living for three years with her six children in the camp and that it was dangerous for her to go out to look for food, because women were often raped doing so. “Our life is very bad,” she said.
“I just met with President Kabila and told him we want to help you return home,” Mrs. Clinton told her.
Mrs. Clinton also met with local aid workers who told her about the horrors in the area, including the rape of an 8-year-old boy on Monday.
Human rights officials describe a certain “Congo fatigue” now creeping in among those trying to solve the conflict there. So many approaches have been tried — a billion-dollar-a-year United Nations peacekeeping mission; extensive disarmament programs; several regional peace treaties; and high-level diplomat visits like this — but nothing seems to work. It is still an intensely predatory conflict, driven by a mix of ethnic, commercial, nationalist and criminal interests.
From the beginning of the war in the mid-1990s, sexual violence has been a persistent expression of the lawlessness and instability. Many hope Mrs. Clinton’s visit can help change this.
“Congo suffers from a deadly attention deficit disorder,” said John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. The fact Mrs. Clinton is here, especially in Goma, “is a major signal that the deadliest war in the world just shot up a few slots in the pecking order.”
But Mrs. Clinton, he said, must go beyond the sexual violence issue and the photo opportunities with Congolese’s victims to address the conflict’s root causes, especially the illicit mineral trade in coltan, which is used in laptops and cellphones, as well as illegal dealings in gold and other minerals.
“The U.S. should work with the electronics industry to trace audit and certify this trade, and pressure neighboring states like Rwanda to stop smuggling,” Mr. Prendergast said. “Like with the blood diamonds that fuel wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola, until the economic driver for conflict is addressed, there is no chance for peace.”
Mrs. Clinton spoke about what she called “conflict minerals” and said that the world must do more to keep profits from them “from ending up in the hands of those who fuel the violence.”
She also said she had pressed Mr. Kabila to ensure the prosecution of five senior officers in the Congolese military who have recently been accused of rape. Congo’s army is notoriously undisciplined, but Mrs. Clinton said that she believed that with training and regular, adequate pay, their behavior could improve.
She said she wanted to see a “new era” of cooperation with Congo and that she spoke with Mr. Kabila about enhancing military cooperation to “professionalize” the Congolese Army. She added that the United States would send a team of legal, financial and technical to help Congo with its governance issues.
Mrs. Clinton left Goma late Tuesday to returning to Kinshasa, the capital, on a United Nations flight. From there, she planned to fly to Nigeria, the fifth stop on her seven-nation African tour.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Goma, Congo, and Sharon Otterman from New York.
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KINSHASA, Congo — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton landed in this central African country on Monday afternoon, saying she wanted to press for an end to the conflict in eastern Congo and underscore the enormous problem of sexual violence there.
Hundreds of thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by the various warring factions that have battled for control of the east for more than a decade. The United Nations has over 17,000 peacekeepers there, but they have been unable to stop the bloodshed and violence.
“Women are being turned into weapons of war,” Mrs. Clinton said on the plane from Angola to Congo, the fourth stop on her seven-nation African tour. When she meets with President Joseph Kabila and other Congolese officials here on Tuesday, she said, “We are going to press them on working on ways to end this conflict.”
Even as Congo works to put down the rebellions in the region, it must gain more control over its own forces, she said, which aid workers say are among the worst offenders when it comes to violence against civilians.
“Their military needs professionalizing,” Mrs. Clinton said.
In Kinshasa, the capital, Mrs. Clinton visited a hospital and spoke with students at a town hall meeting with students. On Tuesday, she plans to fly to the eastern town of Goma, in the epicenter of the conflict zone, to meet with victims of sexual violence and those working to help them.
Along with the dangers posed by the conflict, there have been several plane crashes on the approach to Goma’s mountain-ringed airport. But Mrs. Clinton said the importance of the visit outweighed the risk. “Lots of concerns were raised and objections, but I said this is something I want to do and we’re going,” she said.
Earlier Monday, Mrs. Clinton was in Luanda, Angola, to meet with José Eduardo dos Santos, who has held the Angolan presidency for nearly 30 years.
His country has played a key role in protecting Congo’s government and in recent years has sent thousands of troops to bolster its forces. Mrs. Clinton said she had asked Mr. dos Santos for assistance in ending the Congolese conflict, and suggested Angolan military advisers could help improve Congo’s forces.
American officials have mostly stayed away from Angola, in part because of a brutal 27-year-long civil war that ended in 2002, and in part because the government had long been an ally of Cuba and the eastern bloc. Angola has not held a presidential election since 1992, and in Mrs. Clinton’s meeting with Mr. dos Santos, she called on the government to strengthen its commitment to democracy, raising an issue that has been at the forefront of her African trip.
In their nearly hour-long discussion, she said, she “underscored the importance of moving expeditiously” on adopting a new constitution and holding presidential elections, and talked about greater transparency in the energy sector, as well as health, environmental, and agriculture issues and improved military-to-military cooperation.
“It was a very full, comprehensive discussion on every issue,” she said.
Angola is one of the biggest oil producers in Africa, and the American government is eager to establish strong relations with the government there because the country is seen as an emerging potential powerhouse in southern Africa. China has been busily rebuilding much of the war-torn country, and hoping in return to secure the inside track on Angola’s crude oil reserves.
Mrs. Clinton also called for Angola to do more to spread oil wealth, saying prosperity for ordinary people “depends on good governance and the strengthening of democratic institutions.” And she also signed an agreement with Angola’s health ministry increasing AIDS funding from seven to 17 million dollars.
Late Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton will fly to Nigeria, which is tied with Angola as the biggest oil producer in Africa. From there, she will visit Liberia and Cape Verde before returning to the United States.
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from New York.
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By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/africa/05congo.html?ref=world
GOMA, Congo — It was around 11 p.m. when armed men burst into Kazungu Ziwa’s hut, put a machete to his throat and yanked down his pants. Mr. Ziwa is a tiny man, about four feet, six inches tall. He tried to fight back, but said he was quickly beaten down.
“Then they raped me,” he said. “It was horrible, physically. I was dizzy. My thoughts just left me.”
For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.
According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians.
Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.
The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to hear from survivors on her visit to the country next week. Hundreds of thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by the various warring militias haunting these hills, and right now this area is going through one of its bloodiest periods in years.
The joint military operations that began in January between Rwanda and Congo, David and Goliath neighbors who were recently bitter enemies, were supposed to end the murderous rebel problem along the border and usher in a new epoch of cooperation and peace. Hopes soared after the quick capture of a renegade general who had routed government troops and threatened to march across the country.
But aid organizations say that the military maneuvers have provoked horrific revenge attacks, with more than 500,000 people driven from their homes, dozens of villages burned and hundreds of villagers massacred, including toddlers thrown into open fires.
And it is not just the rebels being blamed. According to human rights groups, soldiers from the Congolese Army are executing civilians, raping women and conscripting villagers to lug their food, ammunition and gear into the jungle. It is often a death march through one of Africa’s lushest, most stunning tropical landscapes, which has also been the scene of a devastatingly complicated war for more than a decade.
“From a humanitarian and human rights perspective, the joint operations are disastrous,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
The male rape cases span several hundred miles and possibly include hundreds of victims. The American Bar Association, which runs a sexual violence legal clinic in Goma, said that more than 10 percent of its cases in June were men.
Brandi Walker, an aid worker at Panzi hospital in nearby Bukavu, said, “Everywhere we go, people say men are getting raped, too.”
But nobody knows the exact number. Men here, like anywhere, are reluctant to come forward. Several who did said they instantly became castaways in their villages, lonely, ridiculed figures, derisively referred to as “bush wives.”
Since being raped several weeks ago, Mr. Ziwa, 53, has not shown much interest in practicing animal medicine, his trade for years. He limps around (his left leg was crushed in the attack) in a soiled white lab coat with “veterinaire” printed on it in red pen, carrying a few biscuit-size pills for dogs and sheep.
“Just thinking about what happened to me makes me tired,” he said.
The same is true for Tupapo Mukuli, who said he was pinned down on his stomach and gang-raped in his cassava patch seven months ago. Mr. Mukuli is now the lone man in the rape ward at Panzi hospital, which is filled with hundreds of women recovering from rape-related injuries. Many knit clothes and weave baskets to make a little money while their bodies heal.
But Mr. Mukuli is left out.
“I don’t know how to make baskets,” he said. So he spends his days sitting on a bench, by himself.
The male rape cases are still just a fraction of those against women. But for the men involved, aid workers say, it is even harder to bounce back.
“Men’s identity is so connected to power and control,” Ms. Walker said.
And in a place where homosexuality is so taboo, the rapes carry an extra dose of shame.
“I’m laughed at,” Mr. Mukuli said. “The people in my village say: ‘You’re no longer a man. Those men in the bush made you their wife.’ ”
Aid workers here say the humiliation is often so severe that male rape victims come forward only if they have urgent health problems, like stomach swelling or continuous bleeding. Sometimes even that is not enough. Ms. Van Woudenberg said that two men whose penises were cinched with rope died a few days later because they were too embarrassed to seek help. Castrations also seem to be increasing, with more butchered men showing up at major hospitals.
Last year, Congo’s rape epidemic appeared to be easing a bit, with fewer cases reported and some rapists jailed. But today, it seems like that thin veneer of law and order has been stripped away. The way villagers describe it, it is open season on civilians.
Muhindo Mwamurabagiro, a tall, graceful woman with long, strong arms, explained how she was walking to the market with friends when they were suddenly surrounded by a group of naked men.
“They grabbed us by the throat and threw us down and raped us,” she said.
Worse, she said, one of the rapists was from her village.
“I yelled, ‘Father of Kondo, I know you, how can you do this?’ ”
One mother said a United Nations peacekeeper raped her 12-year-old boy. A United Nations spokesman said that he had not heard that specific case but that there were indeed a number of new sexual abuse allegations against peacekeepers in Congo and that a team was sent in late July to investigate.
Congolese health professionals are becoming exasperated. Many argue for a political solution, not a military one, and say Western powers should put more pressure on Rwanda, which is widely accused of preserving its own stability by keeping the violence on the other side of the border.
“I understand the world feels guilty about what happened in Rwanda in 1994,” said Denis Mukwege, the lead doctor at Panzi Hospital, referring to Rwanda’s genocide. “But shouldn’t the world feel guilty about what’s happening in Congo today?”
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http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/story/Governor-Cuts-100-percent-of-D…
In an unprecedented move, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has cut 100-percent of domestic violence funding, leaving women’s shelters wondering how they’re going to deal with the loss.
Local shelter directors thought they’d see about a 20 to 30 percent cut, but never 100-percent. With this cut, there are fears that many abused women seeking help will have to be turned away.
“Jane” is a domestic violence victim. She told San Diego 6, “I probably wouldn’t be alive. I would be dead.”
Jane stays at Carol’s House in the North County, a women’s shelter she has called home for several months.
She talked about the abuse she suffered from her former fiancee’. “My abuser beat me in the head with a hammer. Choked me unconscious.”
Jane fears what will happen to the next abused woman looking for help. “That they will die. Whether it would be in the inside or physically.”
Ninety-four women’s shelters statewide are affected. Laurin Pause, Executive Director for Community Resource Center, says half of those shelters might close.
“We hear about domestic violence on our streets already,” said Pause. “That number is going to increase and that is my biggest fear.”
Pause manages Carol’s House which has relied on the state for half of their funding.
“Part of getting a woman to be free and become a survivor is to offer full services which include legal counseling, and some of these programs may have to be cut,” cautioned Pause.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/malalai-joya-the-woman-who-will-…
Enraged by Taliban oppression Malalai Joya became a women’s rights activist, and after the US-led invasion, took on the new regime as an MP. But speaking out has come at a cost. She tells Johann Hari why death threats won’t stop her exposing ugly truths about Afghanistan.
“I am not sure how many more days I will be alive,” Malalai Joya says quietly.
The warlords who make up the new “democratic” government in Afghanistan have been sending bullets and bombs to kill this tiny 30-year-old from the refugee camps for years – and they seem to be getting closer with every attempt. Her enemies call her a “dead woman walking”. “But I don’t fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice,” she says plainly. “I am young and I want to live. But I say to those who would eliminate my voice: ‘I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring.'”
The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for. Here is a young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for girls under the Taliban and – when they were toppled – cast off the burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.
But she says: “Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. [That is] what your soldiers are dying for.” Instead of being liberated, she is on the brink of being killed.
The story of Joya is the story of another Afghanistan – the one behind the burka, and behind the propaganda.
I. “We are our sisters’ keepers”
I meet Joya in a London apartment where she is staying with a supporter for a week, to talk about her memoir – but even here, her movements have to be kept secret, as she flits from one safe house to another. I am told not to mention her location to anyone. She is standing in the corridor, small and slim, with her hair flowing freely, and she greets me with a solid handshake. But, when our photographer snaps her, she begins to giggle girlishly: the grief etched on to her sallow face melts away, and she laughs in joyous little squeaks. “I can never get used to this!” she says.
Then, as I sit her down to talk through her life-story, the pain soaks into her face once more. Her body tightens into a tense coil, and her fists close.
Joya was four days old when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. On that day, her father dropped out of his studies to fight the invading Communist army, and vanished into the mountains. She says: “Since then, all we have known is war.”
Her earliest memory is of clinging to her mother’s legs while policemen ransacked their house looking for evidence of where her father was hiding. Her illiterate mother tried to keep her family of 10 children alive as best she could. When the police became too aggressive, she took her kids to refugee camps across the border in Iran. In these filthy tent-cities lying on the old Silk Road, Afghans huddled together and were treated as second-class citizens by the Iranian regime. At night, wild animals could wander into the tents and attack children. There, word reached the family that Joya’s father had been blown up by a landmine – but he was alive, after losing a leg.
There were no schools in the Iranian camps, and Joya’s mother was determined her daughters would receive the education she never had. So they fled again, to camps in western Pakistan. There, Joya began to read – and was transformed. “Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are,” she says. Starting in her early teens, she inhaled all the literature she could – from Persian poetry to the plays of Bertolt Brecht to the speeches of Martin Luther King. She began to teach her new-found literacy to the older women in the camps, including her own mother.
She soon discovered that she loved to teach – and, when she turned 16, a charity called the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women’s Capabilities (OPAWC) made a bold suggestion: go to Afghanistan, and set up a secret school for girls, under the noses of the Taliban tyranny.
So she gathered her few clothes and books and was smuggled across the border – and “the best days of my life” began. She loathed being forced to wear a burka, being harassed on the streets by the omnipresent “vice and virtue” police, and being under constant threat of being discovered and executed. But she says it was worth it for the little girls. “Every time a new girl joined the class, it was a triumph,” she says, beaming. “There is no better feeling.”
She only just avoided being caught, again and again. One time she was teaching a class of girls in a family’s basement when the mother of the house yelled down suddenly: “Taliban! Taliban!” Joya says: “I told my students to lie down on the floor and stay totally silent. We heard footsteps above us and waited a long time.” On many occasions, ordinary men and women – anonymous strangers – helped her out by sending the police charging off in the wrong direction. She adds: “Every day in Afghanistan, even now, hundreds if not thousands of ordinary women act out these small gestures of solidarity with each other. We are our sisters’ keepers.”
The charity was so impressed with her they appointed her their director. Joya decided to set up a clinic for poor women just before the 9/11 attacks. When the American invasion began, the Taliban fled her province, but the bombs kept falling. “Many lives were needlessly lost, just like during the September 11 tragedy,” she says. “The noise was terrifying, and children covered their ears and screamed and cried. Smoke and dust rose and lingered in the air with every bomb dropped.”
As soon as the Taliban retreated, they were replaced – by the warlords who had ruled Afghanistan immediately before. Joya says that, at this point, “I realised women’s rights had been sold out completely… Most people in the West have been led to believe that the intolerance and brutality towards women in Afghanistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie. Many of the worst atrocities were committed by the fundamentalist mujahedin during the civil war between 1992 and 1996. They introduced the laws oppressing women followed by the Taliban – and now they were marching back to power, backed by the United States. They immediately went back to their old habit of using rape to punish their enemies and reward their fighters.”
The warlords “have ruled Afghanistan ever since,” she adds. While a “showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the US in Kabul”, the real power “is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul”. As an example, she names the former governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. He set up his own “vice and virtue” squads which terrorised women and smashed up video and music cassettes. He had his own “private militias, private jails”. The constitution of Afghanistan is irrelevant in these private fiefdoms.
Joya discovered just what this meant when she started to set up the clinic – and a local warlord announced that it would not be allowed, since she was a woman, and a critic of fundamentalism. She did it anyway, and decided to fight this fundamentalist by running in the election for the Loya jirga (“meeting of the elders”) to draw up the new Afghan constitution. There was a great swelling of support for this girl who wanted to build a clinic – and she was elected. “It turned out my mission,” she says, “would be to expose the true nature of the jirga from within.”
II. “I would never again be safe”
As she stepped past the world’s television cameras into the Loya jirga, the first thing Joya saw was “a long row with some of the worst abusers of human rights that our country had ever known – warlords and war criminals and fascists”.
She could see the men who invited Osama bin Laden into the country, the men who introduced the misogynist laws later followed by the Taliban, the men who had massacred Afghan civilians. Some had got there by intimidating the electorate, others by vote-rigging, and yet more were simply appointed by Hamid Karzai, the former oilman installed by the US army to run the country. She thought of an old Afghan saying: “It’s the same donkey, with a new saddle.”
For a moment, as these old killers started to give long speeches congratulating themselves on the transition to democracy, Joya felt nervous. But then, she says, “I remembered the oppression we face as women in my country, and my nervousness evaporated, replaced by anger.”
When her turn came, she stood, looked around at the blood-soaked warlords on every side, and began to speak. “Why are we allowing criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now… It is they who turned our country into the centre of national and international wars. They are the most anti-women elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again… They should instead be prosecuted in the national and international courts.”
These warlords – who brag about being hard men – could not cope with a slender young woman speaking the truth. They began to shriek and howl, calling her a “prostitute” and “infidel”, and throwing bottles at her. One man tried to punch her in the face. Her microphone was cut off and the jirga descended into a riot.
“From that moment on,” Joya says, “I would never again be safe… For fundamentalists, a women is half a human, meant only to fulfil a man’s every wish and lust, and to produce children and toil in the home. They could not believe that a young woman was tearing off their masks in front of the eyes of the Afghan people.”
A fundamentalist mob turned up a few hours later at her accommodation, announcing they had come to rape and lynch her. She had to be placed under immediate armed guard – but she refused to be protected by American troops, insisting on Afghan officers.
Her speech was broadcast all over the world – and cheered in Afghanistan. She was flooded with support from the people of her country, delighted that somebody had finally spoken out. One dirt-poor village pooled its cash to send a delegate hundreds of miles across the country to explain how pleased they were.
An extremely old woman was brought to her in a rickety wheelbarrow, and she explained she had lost two sons – one to the Soviets, one to the fundamentalists. She told Joya: “I am almost 100 years old, and I am dying. When I heard about you and what you said, I knew that I had to meet you. God must protect you, my dear.”
She handed over her gold ring, her only valuable possession, and said: “You must take it! I have suffered so much in my life, and my last wish is that you accept this gift from me.”
But the US and Nato occupiers instructed Joya that she must show “politeness and respect” for the other delegates. When Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, said this, she replied: “If these criminals raped your mother or your daughter or your grandmother, or killed seven of your sons, let alone destroyed all the moral and material treasure of your country, what words would you use against such criminals that will be inside the framework of politeness and respect?”
She leans forward and quotes Brecht: “He says, ‘He who does not know the truth is only a fool. He who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal.'”
The attempts to murder her began then with a sniper – and have not stopped since. But she says plainly, with her fist clenched: “I wanted the warlords to know I was not afraid of them.”
So she ran for parliament – and won in a landslide. “I would return again to face those who had ruined my country,” she explains, “and I was determined that I would stand straight and never bow again to their threats.”
III. “In every corner is a killer”
Joya looked out across the new Afghan parliament on her first day and thought: “In every corner is a killer, a puppet, a criminal, a drug lord, a fascist. This is not democracy. I am one of the very few people here who has been genuinely elected.” She started her maiden speech by saying: “My condolences to the people of Afghanistan…”
Before she could continue, the warlords began to shout that they would rape and kill her. One warlord, Abdul Sayyaf, yelled a threat at her. Joya looked him straight in the eye and said: “We are not in [the area he rules by force] here, so control yourself.”
I ask if she was frightened, and she shakes her head. “I am never frightened when I tell the truth.” She is speaking fast now: “I am truly honoured to have been vilified and threatened by the savage men who condemned our country to such misery. I feel proud that even though I have no private army, no money, and no world powers behind me, these brutal despots are afraid of me and scheme to eliminate me.”
She says there is no difference for ordinary Afghans between the Taliban and the equally fundamentalist warlords. “Which groups are labelled ‘terrorist’ or ‘fundamentalist’ depends on how useful they are to the goals of the US,” she says. “You have two sides who terrorise women, but the anti-American side are ‘terrorists’ and the pro-American side are ‘heroes’.”
Karzai rules only with the permission of the warlords. He is “a shameless puppet” who will win next month’s presidential elections because “he hasn’t yet stopped working for his masters, the US and the warlords… At this point in our history, the only people who get to serve as president are those selected by the US government and the mafia that holds power in our country.”
Whenever she would despair in parliament, she would meet yet more ordinary Afghan women – and get back in the fight. She tells me about a 16-year-old constituent of hers, Rahella, who ran away to an orphanage Joya had helped to set up in her constituency. “Her uncle had decided to marry her off to his son, who was a drug addict. She was terrified. So of course we took her in, educated her, helped her.” One day, her uncle turned up and apologised, saying he had learnt the error of his ways. He asked if she could come home for a weekend to visit her family. Joya agreed – and when she got back to her village, Rahella was forced into marriage and spirited away to another part of Afghanistan. They heard six months later that she had doused herself in petrol and burned herself alive.
There has been an epidemic of self-immolation by women across the “new” Afghanistan in the past five years. “The hundreds of Afghan women who set themselves ablaze are not only committing suicide to escape their misery,” she says, “they are crying out for justice.”
But she was not allowed to raise these issues in the supposedly democratic parliament. The fundamentalist warlords who couldn’t beat Joya at the ballot box or kill her chanced upon a new way to silence her. The more she spoke, the angrier they got. She called for secularism in Afghanistan, saying: “Religion is a private issue, unrelated to political issues and the government… Real Muslims do not require political leaders to guide them to Islam.” She condemned the new law that declared an amnesty for all war crimes committed in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, saying “You criminals are simply giving yourselves a get-out-of-jail free card.” So the MPs simply voted to kick her out of parliament.
It was illegal and undemocratic – but the President, Hamid Karzai, supported the ban. “Now the warlord criminals are unchallenged in parliament,” she says. “Is that democracy?”
We in the West have been fed “a pack of lies” about what Afghanistan looks like today. “The media are ‘free’ only if they do not try to criticise warlords and officials,” she says in her book, Raising My Voice. As an example, she names a specific warlord: “If you write anything about him, the next day you will be tortured or killed by the Northern Alliance warlords.” It is “a myth” to say girls can now go to school outside Kabul. “Only five per cent of girls, according to the UN, can follow their education to the 12th grade.”
And it is “false” to say Afghan culture is inherently misogynistic. “By the 1950s, there was a growing women’s movement in Afghanistan, demonstrating and fighting for their rights,” she says. “I have a story here” – she rifles through her notes – “from The New York Times in 1959. Here! The headline is ‘Afghanistan’s women lift the veil’. We were developing an open culture for women – and then the foreign wars and invasions crushed it all. If we can regain our independence, we can start this struggle again.”
Many of her friends urge her to leave the country, before one of her wannabe-assassins gets lucky. But, she says, “I can never leave when all the poor people that I love are living in danger and poverty. I am not going to search for a better and safer place, and leave them in a burning hell.” Apologising for her English – which is, in fact, excellent – she quotes Brecht again: “Those who do struggle often fail, but those who do not struggle have already failed.”
Today, she fights for democracy outside parliament. But, she says, any Afghan democrat today is “trapped between two enemies. There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns.” She wants to help the swelling movement of ordinary Afghans in between, who are opposed to both. “With the withdrawal of one enemy, the occupation forces, it [will be] easier to fight against these internal fundamentalist enemies.”
If she were president of Afghanistan, she would begin by referring all the country’s war criminals to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. “Anybody who has murdered my sisters and brothers should be punished,” she says, “from the Taliban, to the warlords, to George W Bush.” Then she would ask all foreign troops to leave immediately. She says that it is wrong to say Afghanistan will simply collapse into civil war if that happens. “What about the civil war now? Today, people are being killed – many, many war crimes. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan doing what they are doing, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people.”
The Afghan public, she adds, are on her side, pointing to a recent opinion poll showing 60 per cent of Afghans want an immediate Nato withdrawal. Many people in Afghanistan were hopeful, she says, about Barack Obama – “but he is actually intensifying the policy of George Bush… I know his election has great symbolic value in terms of the struggle of African-Americans for equal rights, and this struggle is one I admire and respect. But what is important for the world is not whether the President is black or white, but his actions. You can’t eat symbolism.”
US policy is driven by geopolitics, she says, not personalities. “Afghanistan is in the heart of Asia, so it’s a very important place to have military bases – so they can control trade very easily with other Asian powers such as China, Russia, Iran and so on.
“But it can be changed by Americans,” she adds. She is passionate now, her voice rising. “I say to Obama – in my area, 150 people were blown up by US troops in one incident this year. If your family had been there, would you send even more troops and even more bombs? Your government is spending $18m (£11m) to make another Guantanamo jail in Bagram. If your daughter might be detained there, would you be building it? I say to Obama – change course, or otherwise tomorrow people will call you another Bush.”
IV. “It’s hard to be strong all the time”
“It’s not good to show my enemies any weakness, [but] it’s hard to be strong all the time,” Joya says with a sigh, as she runs her hands through her hair. She has been speaking so insistently – with such preternatural courage– that it’s easy to forget she was just a girl when she was thrust into fighting fundamentalism. She was never allowed an adolescence. The fierce concentration on her face melts away, and she looks a little lost. “Yes, my mother is proud of me,” she says, “but you know how mothers are – they worry. Whenever I speak to her on the phone, the first sentence and the last sentence are always ‘Take care’.”
Two years ago, she got married in secret. She can’t name her husband publicly, because he would be killed. Her wedding flowers had to be checked for bombs. She will only say that they met at a press conference, “and he supports everything I do”. She has not seen him “for two months”, she says. “We meet in the safe houses of supporters. I cannot sleep in the same house two nights running. It is a different home every evening.”
Where does this courage come from? She acts as if the answer is obvious – anyone would do it, she claims. But they don’t. Perhaps it comes from her belief that the struggle is long and our individual lives are short, so we can only advance our chosen cause by inches, knowing others will pick up our baton. “When I die, others will come. I am sure of that,” she says.
She certainly has a strong sense of belonging to a long history of Afghans who fought for freedom. “My parents chose my first name after Malalai of Maiwand. She was a young woman who, in 1880, went to the front line of the second Anglo-Afghan war to tend the wounded. When the fighters were close to collapse, she picked up the Afghan flag and led the men into battle herself. She was struck down – but the British suffered a landmark defeat, and, in the end, they were driven out.”
When she ran for office, she had to choose a surname for herself, to protect her family’s identity. “I named myself after Sarwar Joya, the Afghan poet and constitutionalist. He spent 24 years in jails, and was finally killed because he wouldn’t compromise his democratic principles… In Afghanistan we have a saying: the truth is like the sun. When it comes up, nobody can block it out or hide it.”
Malalai Joya knows she could be killed any day now, in our newly liberated Warlord-istan. She hugs me goodbye and says, “We must keep in touch.” But I find myself bleakly wondering if we will ever meet again. Perhaps she senses this, because she suddenly urges me to look again at the last paragraph of her memoir, Raising My Voice. “It really is how I feel,” she says. It reads: “If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice.” I look up into her face, and she is giving me the bravest smile I have ever seen.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR200906…
BUKAVU, Democratic Republic of Congo — Just over a year ago, in answering whether sexual violence in conflict was an issue that the U.N. Security Council should take on, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed, “I am proud that, today, we respond to that lingering question with a resounding ‘yes!’ ” With this statement, and with the cooperation of other power brokers at the table, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1820, which finally recognized sexual violence as a widely used strategy of warfare and cleared the path for the council to respond to it worldwide.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is to report to the Security Council today on implementation of Resolution 1820. What will we learn? A year after adopting the resolution, Congo remains the worst place on the planet to be a woman. Over 12 years, in a regional economic war for resources, hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured, their bodies destroyed by unimaginable acts. The Security Council’s implementation of Resolution 1820 in Congo — the very place that inspired it — has been an utter failure.
Rape as a weapon of war has increased in eastern Congo since June 2008. In January, military operations were launched in North Kivu with the supposed goal of arresting the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and neutralizing his National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) troops as well as the FDLR, the former Rwandan Hutu genocidaires. Even now, with Resolution 1820 in place, no one considers the women. Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch, just back from the front lines in both North and South Kivu, told me Monday that in nearly all the health centers, hospitals and rape counseling centers she visited, rape cases had doubled or tripled since January.
Rapes continue to be committed with near complete impunity. While the number of criminal prosecutions has risen marginally, only low-ranking soldiers are being prosecuted. Not a single commander or officer above the rank of major has been held responsible in all of Congo. Rapes by the national army are increasing, too. MONUC, the U.N. peacekeeping mission, is not only allowing perpetrators to go unpunished but is also providing logistical support to them for their movements in the field. A blacklist of war criminals and rapists who were commanders in current operations was shown to the Security Council, which gave it to President Laurent Kabila. Despite incriminating evidence, none of the commanders was removed. Resolution 1820 was supposed to make the United Nations more sensitive to the issue of sexual violence. How is it possible that in the past year, the United Nations became complicit in supporting rapists as commanders in its operations?
The U.N. spin on operations in the Congo is upbeat. The secretary general lauded their success in a March 8 commentary in the International Herald Tribune. Successful for whom? Chantal, a 3-year-old who was raped so brutally by militia soldiers that she died on the way to the hospital? All her sisters were raped, too.
Resolution 1820 must be enforced with seriousness by the Security Council and the secretary general. Arrests need to be made immediately of known rapists and war criminals at the highest levels. The United Nations must stop supporting military actions, because they are doomed in Congo. And the root economic causes of the war need to be addressed with the leaders of countries in Africa’s Great Lakes region who commit violence to reap benefits from Congo’s minerals, as well as their Western corporate partners. They, too, are liable for these atrocities.
President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice should send a very clear message to the world. It is within U.S. power, as a member of the Security Council, to push for measures to end impunity and to carve out an enduring peace through careful diplomacy for the people of Congo.
A few days ago, I sat in a dark shack with 30 survivors of rape. These women had fled their villages after being brutally terrorized and had randomly found each other. They banded together to form a grass-roots group called I Will Not Kill Myself Today. The women of eastern Congo are enduring their 12th year of sexual terrorism. The girl children born of rape are now being raped. What will it take for the United Nations to finally do something meaningful to stop the violence? The women are waiting.
Eve Ensler, a playwright and activist, is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.
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by Eve Ensler
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/18/congo-women-rape
Despite an emerging women’s movement, the rape of women and girls continues as the UN looks the other way.
In 1996, I was sitting with 20,000 grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their protection to UN peacekeepers who stood passively by as 10,000 men were marched off to be slaughtered. I will never forget the wailing of the women in that stadium as they cried out, demanding the international community explain how they could have allowed this horror to take place.
Now, 13 years later, I am in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, where, this time, UN peacekeepers (Monuc) are not passively standing by and watching the massacres, but are actually supporting the perpetrators.
For nearly 12 years an invisible war has ravaged this beloved, beleaguered country. Over five million dead, hundreds of thousands of women and girls raped and sexually tortured in the most unimaginable ways, 800,000 internally displaced since January 2009 and close to 350,000 forced to flee to neighbouring countries. This violence is fuelled by the world’s need for minerals, most recently due to the economic crisis. Congo, the sixth most mineral-rich country in Africa, has become the stage for a regional war fuelled by economic interests.
In January, military operations were launched in North Kivu. The so-called goal of this military plan was to arrest the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and neutralise his troops, the CNDP, the former Rwandan Hutu militia, the FDLR, as well as other armed militias. Even though public spin on this operation touted its success, the statistics reveal another horrific story. Since the operation began, a thousand women and children have been raped each month in North Kivu, massacres have ravaged villages, displacing entire communities, and new, even more horrific tortures of women have surfaced (including the lighting of fuel in women’s vaginas). There has been no accountability for these horrific crimes, no justice, hardly a mention in the world press.
Now on the heels of catastrophe, rather than learning something, the UN has joined with the FARDC (the Congolese army) to create an even more disastrous plan: Kimya II. This operation reads like a chapter from some psychotic science fiction novel. The plan is to bring together former enemy militias – FARDC, PARECO (Mai Mai), and CNDP – without reason, without training, without investigation into war crimes, without stepping back and considering what steps must be taken to integrate former enemy militias into one unified body. In essence, the war criminals who were responsible for raping, destroying and terrorising Bukavu in 2004 are now being charged with protecting it.
The most terrifying aspect of this operation is that Monuc is officially facilitating it by offering logistical support. What this means is that the international community is supporting this operation. A high-ranking Monuc official told me off the record that when the security council was in Goma a month ago he asked them: “Are you saying you support Kimya II? Does this mean you are supporting war criminals and rapists as commanders of this operation?” When one of the members of the council balked, he produced a blacklist of war criminals with their charges and evidence of their crimes. Security council members gave the list to President Kabila, but none of the commanders were removed and the operation moved forward.
As this ragtag group of starving soldiers spreads out into the forests and villages of South Kivu in preparation for operation Kimya II, the massacres have already begun. The FDLR as usual is revenge-raping women in the forests, and villages are being set on fire. Imagine what it will be like when operation Kimya II actually begins? When these hungry soldiers, thrown together from various militias and led by war criminals and rapists, are unleashed on the population in the forests, where no one is watching and where there is no means of protection. The mind boggles.
No one I have spoken to anywhere in Congo believes this operation will be anything but catastrophic, and this includes foot soldiers in Monuc who are meant to implement the operation, on up to high-ranking officials in the organisation. Yet not a single world leader, Congolese leader, international government or member of the security council is stopping it or offering a viable alternative.
So the war continues because the western world is hungry for Congo’s minerals. It pushes for a military “solution”, knowing full well that these are doomed. Despite a powerful emerging women’s movement, despite the work of brave doctors giving their lives to perform day-long operations on raped women, despite local activists and survivors of rape working with their hearts to change the situation and wake up the world to a war that has destroyed their country, Congo still doesn’t register in our consciousness.
It turns out that Kimya means “Sssh”, quiet, invisible in Swahili. Ironic. Will we as humanity raise our voices before it’s too late and prevent the next round of massacres in Congo?
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By Jennifer Garcia
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20284831,00.html
Three great friends stepped out Thursday night for a good cause. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox Arquette and Sheryl Crow lent their support to pal and OmniPeace founder Mary Fanaro and her night to “Stamp Out Violence Against Women and Girls of the Congo.”
“I am extremely lucky,” Aniston tells PEOPLE. “But these women and girls need help – it makes you think.” Continues Cox Arquette, “We can do something about this. I want to bring awareness to this.”
“I know I have a responsibility,” adds Crow of son Wyatt. “As a mom, the biggest thrill for me, but most humbling role is raising my kid as a humanitarian. I want him to grow up feeling he can do something for people less fortunate.”
The trio of hosts – sporting T-shirts created for the Art of Humanity Foundation and OmniPeace and debuted at the event – mingled and laughed throughout the intimate dinner party, held at STK in L.A. and sponsored by Kitson.
“I couldn’t imagine a better group of three musketeers to help me tonight,” gushed Fanaro of her good pals.
A pregnant Nicole Richie, Marisa Tomei, Demi Moore, James Marsden, David Arquette and Kelly Lynch all showed their support at the event as well.
“I’m all about making people aware and showing them what the problem is. It’s impossible to turn your back on something like this,” says Richie. “It’s really hard to complain about anything when you hear the stories of these women and children and their torture.”
OmniPeace will donate 25 percent of the profits from the sale of the T-shirts to UNICEF & V-Day Foundation to build the City of Joy, a rehabilitation center and safe community for Congolese women girls. Tees are available on www.shopkitson.com for $78.