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WELCOME TO OUR NEW V-DAY NEWS FEATURE – SHAME ON YOU/POWER TO YOU.
V-Day will be highlighting egregious acts of violence as part of our new ongoing SHAME ON YOU feature. The feature will have a companion series POWER TO YOU highlighting Victories over violence. We encourage you to send us your ideas, stories, articles, etc to feature@vday.org .
SHAME ON YOU:
Military rape reports rise, prosecution still low
By ANNE GEARAN – Mar 17, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — More people came forward to report sexual assaults in the military last year, but a significant percentage wouldn’t give crucial details needed for an investigation.
The Pentagon said it received 2,923 reports of sexual assault across the military in the 12 months ending Sept. 30 2008. That’s about a 9 percent increase over the totals reported the year before, but only a fraction of the crimes presumably being committed.
Among the cases reported, only a small number went to military courts, officials acknowledged.
The Pentagon office that collects the data estimates that only 10 percent to 20 percent of sexual assaults among members of the active duty military are reported — a figure similar to estimates of reported cases in the civilian sphere.
The military statistics, required by Congress, cover rape and other assaults across the approximately 1.4 million people in uniform.
Kaye Whitley, director of the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, said most victims are women, most cases involve young people and alcohol is often involved.
The yearly increase in reports is more likely due to larger numbers of victims being willing to come forward than to an overall increase in sexual violence, Whitley said.
That increase includes a jump in cases from combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, to 165 from 131 the year before.
Congresswoman Jane Harman, a congressional critic of the military’s handling of sexual violence, said the statistics show the problem is still rampant.
“While the report shows modest improvement, we’re far from Mission Accomplished,” the California Democrat said in a statement. “Military women are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.”
The latest figures include 2,280 cases in which a victim provided full accounts and physical evidence when possible, and 643 in which a victim sought care or made a report but refused to provide all the information necessary to pursue an investigation.
The Defense Department allows those limited reports on the theory that it encourages victims to at least seek care when they might otherwise keep silent.
Prosecution is slow and large numbers of cases are thrown out or dropped.
The most recent figures, which include cases left open from previous years, show that only 317 cases were referred for courts-martial, or military trials. Another 247 were referred for nonjudicial punishment.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/opinion/21herbert.html
By BOB HERBERT
Perhaps we’ve heard so little about them because the crimes are so unspeakable, the evil so profound.
For years now, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marauding bands of soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women. This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s. Millions have been killed.
Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.
“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries.
In some cases, the rapists have violated their victims with loaded guns and pulled the triggers. Other women have had their organs deliberately destroyed by knives or other weapons. Sons have been forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers. Many women and girls have been abducted and sexually enslaved.
It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed. As The Times’s Jeffrey Gettleman, on assignment in Congo, wrote last fall:
“Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.”
Dr. Mukwege visited me at The Times last week. He was accompanied by the playwright, Eve Ensler, who has been passionate in her efforts to bring attention and assistance to the women of Congo.
I asked Dr. Mukwege to explain how it was in the strategic interest of the various armed groups to rape and otherwise brutalize women. He described some of the ramifications of such atrocities and the ways in which they undermine the entire society in which the women live.
“Once they have raped these women in such a public way,” he said, “sometimes maiming them, destroying their sexual organs — and with everybody watching — the women themselves are destroyed, or virtually destroyed. They are traumatized and humiliated on every level, physical and psychological. That’s the first consequence.
“The second consequence is that the whole family and the entire neighborhood is traumatized by what they have seen. The ordinary sense of family and community is lost after a man has been forced to watch his wife being raped, or parents are forced to watch the rape of their daughters, or children see their mothers raped.
“Neighbors are witnesses to this. Many flee. Families are dislocated. Social relationships are lost. There is no more social network, village network. Not only the victims have been destroyed; the whole village is destroyed.”
The devastating injuries treated by Dr. Mukwege at his hospital can all but stun the imagination. There is no need to detail them further here. AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are commonplace. Often the ability to bear children is destroyed. In many other cases, women end up giving birth to the children of their rapists.
“The hospital can take care of 3,600 women every year,” said Dr. Mukwege. “That is our maximum capacity. We can’t take any more.”
He spoke of ambulance teams that would drive into villages and be besieged by rape victims desperately seeking treatment. “It is awful to see 300 women in need of help,” he said, “and you have to take 10 because the ambulance can only take 10.”
Ms. Ensler spoke of her encounter with an 8-year-old girl during one of her trips to Congo. The girl’s father had been killed in an attack, her mother was raped, and the girl herself was abducted. The child was raped by groups of soldiers over a two-week period and then abandoned.
The girl felt too ashamed to allow herself to be held, Ms. Ensler said, because her injuries had left her incontinent. After explaining how she persuaded the child to accept an embrace, to be hugged, Ms. Ensler said, “If we’re living in a century when an 8-year-old girl is incontinent because that many soldiers have raped her, then something has gone terribly wrong.”
Despite the presence in the region of the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, no one has been able to stop the systematic rape of the Congolese women.
If these are not war crimes, crimes against humanity, then nothing is.
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View Gallery from LA Luncheon >
Jessica Alba on Rihanna, Chris Brown allegations: ‘universal problem’
By Leah Sydney
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedishrag/2009/02/vagina-monologu.html
“The Vagina Monologues” creator Eve Ensler’s annual V-Day luncheon in Los Angeles was focused on violence toward women in the Congo.
But Jessica Alba and Kerry Washington, two celeb supporters of the international organization that has — since 1998 — raised more than $60 million to stop global violence against women, also spoke about the recent Hollywood drama about Rihanna’s alleged assault by boyfriend Chris Brown.
“When things happen publicly, it just makes it a more universal problem that more people can relate to,” Jessica Alba told the Associated Press.
“Whether it’s about the Congo or about celebrities, domestic violence is a social illness that does not discriminate,” Kerry Washington told the Dish Rag. “We have to start talking more openly about this.”
Eve referred to Rihanna’s alleged assault and the shooting deaths of three members of Jennifer Hudson’s family last year, telling the audience, “All these women are our sisters.”
We spoke to Eve about the large number of reader comments on the Dish Rag blog implying that Rihanna may have been to blame for the alleged attack.
Are there socio-economic or racial divides regarding acceptable violence against women?
“I don’t believe it’s a cultural thing,” Ensler said. “In every community in the world, one out of three women are beaten or raped. I’ve seen justification for it in every community in the world. The climate will exist until we shift the mindset of violence against women being unacceptable and not normal. We are still living in a world where the victim — the woman — is blamed. It’s not a cultural thing. Violence against women keeps patriarchy and its oppression and domination in its place. It keeps a structure where men and women can’t live in their full selves. It’s in every social strata and in every section of society.”
Maria Shriver told all the luncheon guests, including Maria Bello, Charlize Theron, Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway, Rosario Dawson, Glamour magazine’s Cindi Leive, ex-Paramount head Sherry Lansing and producer Paula Wagner:”Violence goes on in the best of homes and in poor areas — particularly in times of struggle. Let’s all go out and change one boy, man today.”
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Rihanna among topics at V-Day anti-violence lunch
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iKwDnbtVkZe8yaP-_j1e39…
By SANDY COHEN –
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The topic of Friday’s star-studded V-Day luncheon was the organization’s work with women in the Congo. But Jessica Alba, Kerry Washington and other supporters of V-Day, which has raised more than $60 million to stop violence against women and girls worldwide, were also talking about Rihanna.
“When things happen publicly, it just makes it a more universal problem that more people can relate to,” said Alba, an annual participant in the V-Day luncheon.
Rihanna was reportedly involved in a domestic dispute with boyfriend Chris Brown last week that resulted in his arrest and booking on charges of making criminal threats. A police statement said the woman who reported the incident was injured, and identified Brown as her attacker. Charges have not yet been filed, and neither Brown nor Rihanna has come forth to comment on the incident.
On Friday, Alba read a poem inspired by the experience of a Congolese woman raped so severely and repeatedly by soldiers that she needed surgery. Washington, who serves on the V-Day board, called violence against women “a social illness that does not discriminate.”
“This is a problem that spreads from the Congo to Hollywood,” she said. “When it happens to someone famous, it’s a tragedy that it happened, but what I hope is that people become less and less afraid to talk about how truly devastating this social illness is.”
Rosario Dawson, also a board member, mentioned Rihanna and Jennifer Hudson in her plea to guests to support the V-Day cause.
“What’s so incredible is the sympathy, courage, love and compassion that comes from that,” she said. “That’s what we need to be tapping into and realizing that all of these women, all across the world, are our sisters.”
Playwright and activist Eve Ensler, who founded V-Day 11 years ago after the success of “The Vagina Monologues,” offered a jarring statistic: one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.
“I’m sadly here to say violence against women is a human thing,” Ensler said. “It’s epidemic everywhere.”
V-Day plans to hold 4,000 grass-roots events this year to educate people about violence against women and the atrocities in the Congo, where girls as young as 10 months and grandmothers in their 80s have been victims of sexual violence and mutilation, Ensler said.
Dr. Denis Mukwege, who received the United Nations Human Rights Prize in 2008 for his work in the Congo, told of how he performs a dozen surgeries each day on rape victims. Vicious rape is so common, he said, that he sees repeat patients. He’s also seen wounded women crawl to his clinic door.
V-Day is joining forces with Mukwege’s hospital and UNICEF to build a community for survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ensler said.
Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway read a poem at the luncheon and Maria Shriver closed the program by urging guests to spread the word. Among those heeding her call? Charlize Theron, Camryn Manheim, Anne Archer and Sherry Lansing.
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Rosario Dawson on Rihanna and Jennifer Hudson: We’re All Sisters
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20259296,00.html
By Sara Hammel
Originally posted Saturday February 14, 2009 07:05 AM EST
Rosario Dawson Photo by: Sylvain Gaboury / FilmMagicRosario Dawson on Rihanna and Jennifer Hudson: We’re All Sisters | Rosario Dawson
Charlize Theron, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Kerry Washington and other prominent names gathered Friday to join forces to end violence against women the world over – and Rihanna was not far from anyone’s minds.
At a luncheon in Beverly Hills for V-Day, The Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler’s movement to end violence against women and girls, V-Day board member Dawson made reference to Rihanna and Jennifer Hudson – whose family was murdered in October – as she addressed the luncheon, reminding the audience that “all these women are our sisters.”
Last Sunday’s alleged beating of Rihanna, 20, at the hands of her 19-year-old boyfriend Chris Brown (who is currently under police investigation) must be taken seriously, emphasized Washington.
“I don’t know the details of their situation, but I do know this is an issue that can’t go ignored,” the Ray and Fantastic Four actress told PEOPLE.
“If we talk about violence against women, my hope is we don’t talk about it as petty gossip but as a social illness that must end. So if that’s what’s going on, then we need to all be aware this is a problem that goes from the Congo to Hollywood and everywhere in between,” said Washington.”
Dawson earlier had told PEOPLE that she had “met Rihanna a few times, and I think she’s such a sweet young lady, and my heart goes out to her.”
Alba Tears Up
The event launched the Turning Pain to Power Tour, which aims to combat rampant rape and mutilation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and honored Dr. Denis Mukwege, who volunteers in the DRC to operate on women whose bodies have been ravaged by rape during the Congolese war.
Kicking off the lunch, Jessica Alba choked up as she read a first-person account of an African woman who had been attacked.
As she read a testimonial of Pasquazine, 39, who had been raped when intruders broke into her home and killed several family members, Alba teared up and paused before continuing.
Alba’s delivery, along with readings of Ensler’s latest work – by Rosario, Washington and the playwright herself – were “moving,” Theron acknowledged afterwards.
“I was born and raised in a country with similar turmoil. People want to help, but don’t know how,” the South African Monster Oscar winner told PEOPLE. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”
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Tens of thousands of women have been brutally raped in the DRC as part of an ongoing internal conflict. We speak with playwright and V-Day founder Eve Ensler and Congolese gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege, founder of one of the only hospitals that treats victims of rape and mutilation. Dr. Mukwege has helped over 21,000 women in the past decade and was named “African of the Year” by a Nigerian newspaper last month
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Open Letter to President-Elect Barack Obama
Huffington Post – January 13, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler-kavita-ramdas-and-zainab-salbi/…
On December 5, 2008, a few days before the 60th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a group of global and domestic women’s organizations gathered in New York to frame a shared agenda for advancing global women’s rights. Determined to use their collective strength and expertise to work together to advance a global agenda for women’s freedom, safety and agency, they crafted the following open letter to President-Elect Obama and committed to working together to see their vision come true in this century.
Open Letter to President-Elect Obama,
Dear President-Elect Obama,
As a group of women leaders who have given our lives to the transformation, protection and empowerment of women in the United States and globally, we want to begin by congratulating you. We are honored and proud to have you lead the nation during this historic time. We also welcome your call to action, reminding us of what we have always known — that as global citizens we cannot solely rely on any one administration’s ability to bring about change, but must be steadfast in pushing forward our own vision and agendas.
We represent an historic movement for change: millions of women across the globe with innovative ideas, influential constituencies and collaborative solutions. We are calling on you to ensure that women are equally represented in everything, from your administration’s infrastructure to its decision-making and solution building. We are calling on you to exercise leadership in dismantling the structures that perpetuate gender inequality, impede women’s full participation in society and thwart real progress for people around the world.
As war rages in Gaza, it is clear that the time has come to dismantle militarism as the dominant ideology in world politics. We must ensure that women take the lead in building lasting peace in the Middle East, ending genocide in Darfur, stopping femicide in the Democratic Republic of Congo, fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan, and ending the war in Iraq.
Though the select-few women who hold leadership positions in this country’s political system inspire us; women represent more than 50% of the population and deserve more than marginal representation. We believe that in order for your vision of change to succeed, women must be in positions of power. While US women gained the right to vote 100 years ago, to date only 14% of the US Congress are women. This must change.
The major economic, security, governance and environmental challenges of our times cannot be solved without the equal participation of women at all levels of society — from the home to institutions of national and global governance. Women’s voices must be central in all major discussions including the economic crisis, overhauling our education system. Long-term investments in women’s education, health and leadership development are equally critical. Economic structures continue to marginalize women. Consider this: women represent two-thirds of the world’s labor yet we own less than 1% of the world’s assets.
In addition, more than 500,000 women die each year because of inadequate medical and reproductive care. Violence against women is a pandemic that determines women’s realities, impeding their access to education and economic self-sufficiency. This global epidemic is undermining the future of the world, as women are at the heart of all communities and families; we literally carry the future in our bodies.
Yet these are not “women’s issues”. In fact, such investments are vital to economic growth and the well-being of all individuals, communities, societies and nations. Consider India’s economic transformation of the past 15 years: The World Bank finds that states with the highest percentage of women in the labor force grew the fastest and had the largest reductions in poverty.
As policy makers, activists, researchers, and grant-makers we have spent our lives investing in women and know that these kinds of investments have immeasurable and fundamental impact for the better. Worldwide, women are uniquely positioned to bring innovative insights and creative solutions to global leadership forums. If we hope to improve existing economic, peace and security, and human development frameworks women must not only be included, but must be at the heart of the discussion.
We are calling on you to be the President who ushers in the time of women. Our vision of the future is one in which women and men are equal partners, standing shoulder to shoulder in confronting the world’s challenges. We welcome, with hope and anticipation, your shared commitment to this vision.
We represent more than half of the world’s human potential. And our time has come.
Sincerely,
Linda Basch, PhD
President, National Council for Research on Women
Mallika Dutt
Executive Director, Breakthrough: Building Human Rights Culture
Eve Ensler
Founder, V-Day
Adrienne Germain
President, International Women’s Health Coalition
Sara Gould
CEO, Ms. Foundation
Christine Grumm
CEO, Women’s Funding Network
Geeta Rao Gupta
President, International Center for Research on Women
Carolyn Makinson
Executive Director, Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children
Kavita Ramdas
CEO, Global Fund for Women
Zainab Salbi
President, Women for Women International
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler-and-stephen-lewis/the-never-end…
Eve Ensler and Stephen Lewis
There is a modest rush to bring humanitarian aid to the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). After weeks of escalating conflict, during which hundreds of thousands have been displaced, hundreds more women raped, and many civilians slaughtered, there is now the possibility that three thousand additional peacekeepers will be sent to DRC. There have been high-level meetings with militia leader Nkunda and Presidents Kabila of the Congo and Kagame of neighboring Rwanda. There is a new element of care and concern.
But why does the world behave as if there is suddenly a new war in the DRC? For thousands upon thousands of women, the war that began 12 years ago has never ended. Each day, women have been threatened with rape, torture, abuse and violation. Many of us have been calling for intervention on their behalf for years, especially the last two years. We have spoken at the Security Council, we have met with European governments, we have pushed the U.S. administration, we have made countless speeches. We have launched a worldwide campaign: “Stop Raping our Greatest Resource; Power to the Women and Girls of the DRC”. We have begged, cajoled and pleaded for triple the number of peacekeepers to protect the women, for an end to impunity, for shining a light on the connection between the sexual violence and the plundering of Congo’s vast resources by militias and multi-national companies. We have worked with brave and resilient women and men in the DRC who are building movements from the ground up to break the silence, demanding an end to war.
It is acknowledged across the board that the sexual atrocities perpetrated on women in the DRC are without a doubt the worst atrocities in the world today. It may seem extreme to call what is happening a Femicide — the violence may not fit the exact legal definition of the Genocide Convention — but for the women facing such systematic destruction, targeted precisely and only because they are women, Femicide is a word whose time has come. The numbers are appalling. More than a quarter of a million women have been raped in the last decade. The crimes are shocking: gang rapes; the raping of three-month-old infants and eighty-year-old women; the dispatching of militias who have AIDS and other STDs to rape entire villages; women being held as sex slaves for weeks, months and years; and women being forced to eat murdered babies.
At Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, over ten women who have been raped and tortured arrive daily. Their vaginas are ripped apart; for some that means that their reproductive organs are permanently destroyed. Many have fistula — a hole in the wall of tissue between the vagina and the rectum or the vagina and the bladder. These wounds are most often inflicted by militias who attack using sticks, knives or guns, or through the merciless vaginal penetration of mass rape.
What makes it all so appalling is that everyone in power knows what is happening. On December 10, the founder of Panzi — Dr. Denis Mukwege — was awarded the United Nations Prize in the field of Human Rights, an award which Nelson Mandela and other esteemed leaders have received. There are Security Council resolutions, dramatic visits by western Foreign Ministers, increasing news coverage, coalitions of UN agencies, statements by humanitarian NGO’s, 17,000 peacekeepers on the ground, and yet the sexual violence never ceases.
The missing piece of the analysis is that peace and war have always been measured in gun blasts. When men take up arms, and other men fight back, war is declared; when men agree to a ceasefire, the war is said to have stopped. Now we’ve come to the point when the world has recognized that in conflict after conflict, a gruesome, sadistic dimension has been added to modern-day-war, a widespread strategy employed by men to achieve their military and political ends: the rape of civilian women and girls.
All the parties to the war in the DRC may agree in theory that rape is being used as a ‘weapon of war’, but when they sit around the negotiating table and work out the terms that will end the fighting, they consistently forget to include for discussion just one weapon in the arsenal: rape. And so sexual violence has continued unabated, never letting up during the periods of so-called ‘peace’.
And it will continue, because although we claim that rape is a weapon, committing a rape has never constituted a breach of any peace accord.
Enough of the lip service. If rape is a weapon of the Congo’s war — and we know that the threat of rape is a terrorist tactic, causing communities to flee their homes and farms, causing millions of deaths by starvation, making rape the single most deadly of all the militias’ weapons — then treat it with the gravity afforded every other weapon. Insist that the militias lay down their weapons AND stop their raping. Until the sexual violence ends, the world has no right to speak of peace.
Eve Ensler is a writer and activist, and the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls.
Stephen Lewis is the Co-Founder of AIDS-Free World and the former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.
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Stephen Leahy
TORONTO, Canada, Dec 3 (IPS) – International lust for the enormous mineral and resource riches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) abetted by international indifference has turned much of country into a colossal “rape mine” where more than 300,000 women and girls have been brutalised, say activists.
“Rape is being used as a deliberate tool to control people and territory,” said Eve Ensler, a celebrated U.S. playwright and founder of V-Day, a global movement in 120 countries to end violence against women and girls.
“The rapes are systematic, horrific and often involve bands of rebels infected with HIV/AIDS,” Ensler, who recently returned from the DRC, told IPS.
Ensler was in Toronto to help raise funds for the Panzi Hospital in the DRC’s South Kivu Province where many rape victims are brought. Once a maternity hospital, Panzi Hospital now provides free care and refuge to 3,500 victims of sexual violence each year. Denis Mukwege leads a team of six surgeons who routinely work 18-hour days to repair women’s extensive internal injuries.
Hundreds of women and children were raped yesterday, hundreds more today. This is an economic war that uses terror as its main weapon to ensure warlords and their bands control regions where international companies mine for valuable metals like tin, silver and coltan, or extract lumber and diamonds, Ensler said.
Coltan is a rare and extremely valuable metal used in cell phones, DVD players, computers, digital cameras, video games, vehicle air bags, and more. It has long been implicated as both the source of funding and primary cause of the ongoing conflict and extraordinary violence against women.
“A friend mapped the locations of the mass rapes in the DRC and they correspond to coltan mining regions,” she said.
This “blood coltan” — akin to blood diamonds — generates billions of dollars of sales every year for electronics manufacturers in rich countries and brings hundreds of millions of dollars to rebels and others who control the coltan-producing regions. Coltan is also produced in other countries, and the DRC’s “blood coltan” is often transported to those countries to give it a sheen of conflict-free provenance.
Over five million people have been killed in the ongoing war following the overthrow of the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. The United Nations’ largest-ever peacekeeping force of 17,000 has been in the DRC since 2000. However, it is a vast country the size of Western Europe, and with few roads.
Last Jan. 22, rebel groups signed a peace treaty with an ineffective DRC government accused of corruption and complicit in the rape of women. Despite the treaty, thousands of women and young girls in the eastern Congo have been raped this year in the region that borders Rwanda and Uganda where coltan and other minerals are found. Large-scale fighting resumed in July, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.
“The failure of the international community has created a catastrophe in the DRC,” said Stephen Lewis, former U.N. special envoy for AIDS in Africa and founder of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, a charity that supports 300 grassroots projects in Africa. Headquartered in Toronto, the foundation is a financial supporter of the Panzi Hospital.
Last June, the U.N. Security Council, chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, passed Security Council Resolution 1820 condemning the use of sexual violence against women and girls in conflict and post-conflict situations.
Lewis told IPS that while the resolution was an unprecedented agreement by the world community, “not a thing has happened since then. It is as if the world exalted in the fine words of the resolution and then let its intent die.”
He is also critical of the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy to the region, Olusegun Obasanjo, the former president of Nigeria, who is meeting rebel and government leaders but who has not met with the women of the Congo. Women must be brought to the table, Lewis said. They were also excluded during the previous peace negotiations.
“We have to stop the raping or the war will never end,” he said.
The U.N. Security Council recently voted to send an extra 3,000 peacekeepers to eastern Congo to help protect civilians affected by the fighting. By most accounts, that effort will fall far short. “With 50,000 U.N. peacekeepers, the women of the DRC could be protected,” said Lewis.
Three years ago, the global community agreed it has a responsibility to protect people when a government is unable or unwilling to protect its own citizens from the worst violations of human rights. However, there has been widespread failure to live up to that commitment, which Lewis characterises as “an appalling and grotesque indifference by the world community”.
Lewis, a Canadian, is especially outraged that Canada — which championed the “responsibility to protect” principle — has been “completely and utterly silent on the DRC”.
However, he is hopeful that the present Canadian government modeled on the Bush neo-conservative administration will be brought down next week and a centre-left coalition government will bring a strong Canadian voice in support of ending the violence against women in the DRC.
The new U.S. government headed by President-elect Barack Obama could also be a very powerful force for change. “I see a real gleam of light at last,” said Lewis.
The violence and conflict in the DRC will not be easy to resolve, but is no harder than some of the other global issues like HIV/AIDS, he said.
Both Lewis and Ensler have been involved in efforts in the DRC to change things for women. Some 90 forums were held in the eastern Congo last September where women spoke out about the violence and rape. “No one talks about rape, there is a social stigma where the victims are shunned,” said Ensler.
A new village for rape victims Ensler calls the “City of Joy” is being built near the Panzi Hospital. She envisions it as leadership centre where rape survivors support and learn from each other, and then teach others that the larger community is responsible for rape, not the women.
“The Congo’s greatest resource is its brilliant and resilient women and girls,” she said. “With a little international support, these generous and amazing women can turn this horrific situation around.”
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Originally published in:
Voice of America — voanews.com
By Joe De Capua
De capua interview with Eve Ensler – Download (MP3) audio clip
De capua interview with Eve Ensler – Listen (MP3) audio clip
De Capua interview with Stephen Lewis – Download (MP3) audio clip
De Capua interview with Stephen Lewis – Listen (MP3) audio clip
One of the tragedies of the war in the eastern DRC is the huge number of women who have been raped.
Playwright Eve Ensler is the founder of V-Day – a global movement to end violence against women and girls that has raised nearly $70 million dollars. She has made several visits to Panzi Hospital in the DRC’s South Kivu Province, where many rape victims are brought. From Toronto, Canada, she spoke to VOA English to Africa Service reporter Joe De Capua about her impressions when she paid her first visit to the hospital.
“Because of V-day…I’ve spent the last 10 years traveling to probably 60 and I’ve spent a lot of time in what I call the rape mines of the world. You know, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan and Haiti and Kosovo. But I have to tell you nothing quite prepared me for the level of violence and atrocities that I heard and witnessed in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” she says.
She says that the war has been allowed to continue with impunity, describing the government as non-functional and UN peacekeepers as ineffective. “Because it’s gone on for so long, it’s become ordinary. It’s become something that’s now a part of everyday life. As an activist said there, rape has become a country sport,” she says.
Ensler says estimates put the number of women raped in the eastern DRC in the last 10 years at up to 400,000. “But the kind of violence that’s going on – the gang rapings, the militias that are released knowing that they have AIDS and released on communities knowing they have STDs… Girls as young as four months, six months old, tons of eight year old girls, teenagers, woman as old as 80…being raped with knives, being raped by guns,” she says.
Many of the woman who’ve been raped have fistula – holes in internal organs, such as the bladder. “I’ve been back (to Panzi) three times and each time…there’s another two to three hundred women there, brand new women, who have been raped. And to see women who have been made incontinent, who are peeing and pooping on themselves because of the kind of punctures they have inside their bodies, to see women lined up for operations as a result of sexual violation, it felt like being on the other side of humanity,” she says.
Ensler uses the term femicide to describe widespread violence against women and girls.
Asked what could be done, Ensler says, “We have started a huge campaign called Stop Raping Our Greatest resource – Power to the Women and Girls of the DRC. And we’re doing it in partnership with UNICEF and 17 (other) UN agencies, as well as many groups on the ground. We’re doing forums all over the eastern Congo where women are speaking out and breaking the silence.”
She says the campaign is behind the City of Joy, “which will be the first center for a hundred women who have suffered these atrocities, but where it becomes a leadership academy so we turn pain to power. And then we’re building an international movement this V-Day where at all the thousands of events around the world people will be focused on the DRC.… If we can change the situation in the Congo, we can do it everywhere.”
Joining Ensler in calling for immediate action on the DRC is Stephen Lewis, former UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa and founder of the Stephen Lewis foundation.
He says, “The most important thing is to talk with the women of the Congo, particularly the women who have been raped and subject to sexual violence. There is a tendency, particularly from the United Nations, to deal only with the men with guns and think that if they can stop the shooting they’ve ended the war. But there’s another component to the war. And it’s called rape. And the raping has never ended (In the DRC) from 1996 to this day. And you’re never going to end the war in the Congo until you prevent the violence to the women. And therefore you’ve got to involve the women in the peace negotiations. And incredibly enough, they have never been involved,” he says.
Lewis says the UN special envoy to the DRC has not spoken to the women. “So when the (UN) secretary-general appoints the former president of Nigeria, Obasanjo – Obasanjo runs around and he speaks to the rebel head (Laurent) Nkunda and he runs off to speak to the president of Congo, (Joseph) Kabila, and he’ll speak to (President Paul) Kagame of Rwanda, it’s all wrong. The place you start is with the women because they have been the most ferocious subjects of the war,” Lewis says.
Lewis says the sexual violence is fueling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the DRC. “We all know that the act of raping, particularly the violence of the sexual assaults, create tears in the reproductive tracts of the women through which the AIDS virus can be transmitted. So, inevitably, you have this dual horror. One the one hand you are subject to a rape, frequently a gang rape, and on the other hand you end up HIV positive…. And your life is ruined in both aspects. It reminds me of Rwanda. It reminds me of Darfur. The international community just stands and watches this happen. We have 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers in the Congo, whose mandate it is to protect the women and they cannot protect the women,” he says.
The former UN special envoy is calling for triple the number of peacekeeping troops in the eastern DRC. “Three years ago, the entire world agreed on a new international principle. The principle was called the responsibility to protect. The leaders said to each other if a government is unable or unwilling to protect its people from grotesque violations of human rights, then the international community has the right to intervene,” he says.
Lewis says that the intervention can be done “politically, diplomatically, economically or we can send in troops. And frankly what the Congo needs at this point is troops.”
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Originally published in:
National Catholic Register
Columnist:
Nicole Sotelo
“I asked God to kill me,” said the 29-year old rape survivor. Her brother, children and parents had been murdered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s decade-long war. What hope was left? But she saw a baby, alive, on the ground near her slain parents. She carried the child to safety and now is raising the child as her own. “Maybe God didn’t want me to lose my life.”
This story and hundreds more like them have been heard and shared by Eve Ensler, director of V-Day, an international organization working to stop violence against women. Ensler, known internationally for her play “The Vagina Monologues,” has worked tirelessly to make the world aware of what has been called “Africa’s World War.” Over the last decade there has been fighting among various factions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC. The war has taken the lives of more than 5 million people due to the conflict or war-related starvation and disease — the most war-related deaths since World War II. One of the most common and most brutal weapons of choice has been the rape of women and children.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of rapes have occurred. Accurate statistics are impossible but two years ago the United Nations reported 27,000 rapes in one region alone. And those are just the ones that were reported.
No woman is spared. Young girls and elderly women alike have been beaten, gang-raped, and disemboweled. Women’s children are killed in front of them. Pregnant women are cut open. Those who survive have difficulty finding adequate medical care, let alone counseling for the emotional scars. And those who care for rape survivors are also vulnerable. In September, a hospital known for its care of rape survivors was attacked.
What is being done to stop this violence? There is a U.N. peacekeeping force of about 17,000 troops from 18 countries around the globe. It is the largest peacekeeping force currently in the world.
Not one soldier has been sent from the United States. We, instead, have chosen to protect another natural resource. Not women. Not children. But oil.
Instead of going to war to protect the hundreds of thousands of women being brutally raped and murdered in the DRC, the United States has chosen to go to war to protect our stake in Iraq’s oil reserves. There are currently 146,000 troops stationed in Iraq. Helping the troops, there have been up to 180,000 private contractors in Iraq under U.S. contracts. But not one soldier or private contractor has been sent to stop the violence in the DRC.
The National Priorities Project estimates that the United States has spent more than $570 billion in Iraq since the outbreak of the war. The project released a report this month that shows the U.S. military spends up to 30 percent of its annual budget to secure energy resources internationally. This adds up to $215.4 billion dollars a year.
Contrast this with small organizations like V-Day which is asking individuals to donate $25 or $50 to help a small hospital in the DRC that reconstructs women’s vaginas after they have been brutally ripped open not only by penises but by guns and pieces of wood that men force into their bodies.
One woman, Claudine Mwabachizi, recently spoke about her kidnapping by men in a forest. She had been tied to a tree for days and repeatedly gang-raped. The New York Times ran a story this week that quoted her as saying, “A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves.” Instead, she decided to share her story publicly. Her reason? “To free my sisters,” she said.
My fellow Catholics, we are also called to speak boldly and urgently to stop the violence being done against women and all people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We can no longer allow our country to spend billions on a war to “free up” oil. We must help free our sisters, instead.
For more information, to donate or to take action, go to www.vday.org [1] or www.raisehopeforcongo.org [2].