V-Day Blog Archive

‘Swimming’ back home: A play by and for Katrina’s women warriors returns to the city of its birth (The Times-Picayune)

By Molly Reid
Staff writer

Eve Ensler has seen the burden women carry in times of crisis.

The celebrated playwright and activist, author of “The Vagina Monologues” and founder of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women, has traveled around the world to counsel women who have lived through unthinkable horrors: sexual violence in war-torn Bosnia, Haiti, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; families, homes and livelihoods destroyed by the tsunami in Sri Lanka.

Ensler knew that the women of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast also carried a weighty load as victims of catastrophe. Following Hurricane Katrina, women assumed the burden of their own pain, as well as that of their husbands, children and family, she said. Witnessing that struggle inspired her to create a new play, “Swimming Upstream,” written by and for the “Katrina Warriors” who have contributed so much to rebuilding the region.

The play premiered in April at the V-Day 10th anniversary celebration in New Orleans, and returns Tuesday for the first local repeat performance since its debut.

“Usually, (women) are the people who don’t create the wars or pick up the guns, or have a say in the structural realities of crisis,” Ensler said in a recent phone interview, “yet they are the ones who always end up picking up the community, repairing the community, because they are so resilient.”

The play was formed through the stories of 16 female Katrina survivors who met for monthly writing collaborations with Ensler over a year-long period. The contributors included actors, writers, a storyteller, a spoken word artist, a Mardi Gras Indian and other members of the New Orleans cultural arts scene, said Anne-Liese Juge Fox, one of the members of the original writing team and artistic director of NOLA Playback Theatre.

“Eve’s approach was, she knew we were experts in what we were going through,” Fox said. “Writing it . . . was very healing; it was very cathartic. Eve met with us each time and helped us, really kind of helped us direct our writing in terms of what we wanted to come up with, taking out our personal experiences and writing about them.”

Some members drew from personal experiences, while others interviewed friends, family and strangers to gather material, Fox said. After a year, Ensler took the main story lines the writers had identified and “went away and crafted it, really brought it together to give it a dramatic structure,” Fox said.

The result was a play similar to “The Vagina Monologues,” in that each woman tells an individual story. But unlike “Monologues,” which is in strict monologue form, all the women in “Swimming Upstream” are onstage together, and take turns sharing parts of their stories as the others chime in to respond.

The play covers experiences from before, during and after Katrina, and the characters are drawn from a wide cross-section of New Orleans society, from an older Uptown white woman to a black woman from the Lower 9th Ward. All share the pain of the storm and the responsibility of dealing with its aftermath in their families’ and friends’ lives.

“The piece takes an emotional journey,” Fox said. “It’s a very poly-vocal piece. We are taking on several women’s experiences. It’s the stream, everybody struggling up the same stream.”

The play premiered April 11 to an audience of more than 5,000 at the Louisiana Superdome, which had been transformed in honor of V-Day into “Superlove,” a calming respite with massages, story sharing circles and other indulgences for thousands of Katrina survivors who attended. The performance mixed celebrities with local performers, and was accented by outbursts of affirmation from the audience, recalled Carol Bebelle, executive director of the Ashe Cultural Arts Center, which is co-producing the play with V-Day.

“It was the whole notion of the audience being picked up and not being let go until it was over,” Bebelle said. “All the comments — ‘Yeah, you right,’ ‘Yes indeed,’ ‘Amen!’ — it was like church, just testifying to the accuracy of it. You see the red eyes of the folks leaving, and the people grabbing you — I was just blown away.”

Tuesday’s performance here coincides with Ashe’s 10th anniversary, and the nonprofit organization also produced an 11-show run of “Swimming Upstream” in Atlanta, where it was performed by the True Colors Theatre Company, Bebelle said.

Celebrity performers Jasmine Guy, Shirley Knight and Liz Mikel are scheduled to appear in the New Orleans show, which will take place at the Howlin’ Wolf.

Ensler said she hopes the performance will give more New Orleans women a chance to exorcise their own Katrina experiences through the stories of the characters. Although the storm is three years past, she added, the impact of the storm on New Orleans is still palpable.

“We know it’s really hard for people in New Orleans now,” Ensler said.

But the message of “Swimming Upstream” is a positive one.

“This piece is about how women kept New Orleans together,” Ensler said, “through cooking, through grassroots movements, love of their children, they kept New Orleans moving forward.”

Read Eve’s Huffington Post Op-Ed on Congo – “The Beginning of Hope or The End of It”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/the-beginning-of-hope-or_b_1394…

I spent the last month in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), much of my time in Goma. There, I was privileged to be part of the first public testimonies where women survivors of rape and sexual torture came forward in front hundreds to bravely break the silence on the terrible atrocities done to their bodies and souls during the twelve-year conflict that has embroiled the DRC. The conflict, a virtual proxy war fought between the Congolese government, former Hutu Genocidaires from Rwanda, and ethnic Tutsis is the largest the world has seen since WWII. I heard stories that ranged from young women being raped by fifty men in one day to women being forced to eat dead babies. These women represented hundreds of thousands of survivors of similar crimes. These public testimonies, and other surrounding activities, are part of a fragile but burgeoning grassroots peace movement in the DRC–a movement that exists to stop the violence and restore individual and national autonomy.

The weeks I spent in Goma reflected the insane duality that is the Congo. I met activists, doctors, nurses, NGO workers, leaders, filled with determination and hope, working non-stop, to save lives, heal trauma and provide the most basic resources. At the same time, despair lingered around the borders as rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s troops pillaged, killed, and raped, 16 kilometers away.

Now that I have returned to the US, and there is full scale war with Nkunda’s troops threatening to take Goma, I receive emails and calls by the minute from people on the ground who have been rendered speechless and thrown into despair. Where is the world? they ask me. Why is no one coming to defend us? I wonder: What stops the world from intervening on behalf of the people of the Congo?

12 years later, 5.4 million are dead, over 300,000 raped. What about this conflict doesn’t move the world to action? Is it that the Congolese people no longer exist in our imagination, since they were decimated by the colonialism and brutality of King Leopold of Belgium? Is it that the vast resources of the Congo–coltan for our cell phones, for example–are all that the West is paying attention to? Is it simply racism–that unless white people are involved in the conflict the world does not intervene? Or, is it because so much of this war is being waged on the bodies, genitals and reproductive organs of women and that the world still does not give a damn about women?

Right now, in America, we are living in the center of a potential paradigm shift. A definite, burgeoning movement. A time of Hope. With the upcoming elections, we could redefine America’s standing in the world by enacting foreign policy that is based on the universal understanding that we are all interconnected. That the rape of an eight-year-old-girl in Congo is akin to the rape of an eight-year-old girl in Chicago or Phoenix. We use the words and slogans “Never again” and “Not on our watch”, but right now thousands are being displaced, raped, murdered in Eastern DRC.

“The Responsibility to Protect” requires that we, as the international community, particularly America, intervene where governments cannot protect their own people, demand that more UN peacekeeping troops are deployed and seriously focused on the mission of protection. Where the world sees to it that leaders are brought to the negotiating table to find solutions to the conflict so that the people of Congo are no longer pawns in this economic and ethnic battle. Where the world delivers plentiful resources to Congolese women and girls, who have survived the unthinkable.

The Congo is the heart of Africa and Africa is the heart of the world. Right now Eastern Congo is about to spin out of control and tumble into full-scale war. Let the DRC be the place where the paradigm actually shifts. Where we usher in a time of Hope. We have to do more than we have ever done before. The time to act is now.

Eve Ensler
Playwright of The Vagina Monologues and the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls.

How rebels profit from blood and soil (The Globe & Mail)

Unregulated trade in Congolese mineral wealth keeps warlords in business fighting a civil war and has made the remnants of Rwanda’s genocide squads richer than they’ve ever been

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081024.wcongo1025/B…

STEPHANIE NOLEN

LUNTUKULU, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO — Once a week, a huge, battered flatbed truck creaks its way down a mountain road and stops in this small village in eastern Congo, where the dirt track ends at a small army checkpoint.

The truck is driven by a couple of traders from Bukavu, the regional capital, a day’s drive away. And when the traders arrive, the miners of Luntukulu come forward with what they have to sell: small piles of loose rock, some of them gleaming with shiny yellow threads: wolframite, or tungsten ore, bound for industrial use in Europe. The traders pay the miners $6 (U.S.) a kilogram, which works out to about $8 for a week’s work, and then pile the ore in the back of the truck.

Then they do something else. “The vehicle stops here, but the traders continue on foot, and they take labourers with them to carry out what they will buy,” said Pierre Beningabo, who spends his days in a shallow cave chiselling for the dull glint of wolframite.

The traders walk five kilometres along a dirt track to the next village, he and many local miners said, and there they buy more minerals – this time, from soldiers of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), one of 23 different armed groups in eastern Congo who have worked to bring this region back to war once again.

Congo’s long-running war feeds on mining money. An estimated five million people have died in this conflict, which nominally ended in a peace deal in 2003, but which never really went away in the east. The war has roared back into life in recent weeks; at least 850,000 people are now displaced in the east and thousands of women have been victim of the war’s signature tactic, public gang rape.

Congo’s war is often linked, in vague terms, to the mineral trade, but here in Luntukulu, it is easy to see exactly how it works: the industry is essentially unregulated, smuggling is simple to do and rife, and no one has any incentive to try to drive the armed militias out of the business. “The armed groups are all involved in mining – even our Congolese armed forces,” sighed Juvenal Nyamugusha, who heads the provincial mining ministry.

The FLDR, for instance – made up of the remnants of the Interahamwe, who carried out the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and some new Congolese and Rwandan recruits – controls vast swaths of territory in this region of Congo, and there is no confusion about how they chose the land they seized. “The mineral areas, the FDLR are only in mineral areas – they are there where you find tin or coltan or wolframite,” said Joseph Kakez, the administrator for this district, which is dotted with patches of rich mines, and rebel groups.

Here, near Luntukulu, the militia members dig in particular for coltan, or tantalite, the mineral that goes into making cellphones, laptop computers and Sony PlayStations. And they sell to the traders, who have the ore carried back out to their trucks back up at the village checkpoint – after paying $40 a kilogram. And so the Interahamwe, or what remains of it, is wealthier and more powerful than it was 14 years ago, when the killing ended in Rwanda.

“The FDLR are the ones controlling the coltan mines and they are very strong,” said Mr. Beningabo, the miner. The provincial mining ministry says the FDLR, in fact, controls 20 per cent of mining here.

A squad of Congolese army soldiers are posted in Luntukulu to, in theory, isolate the Rwandan rebels. In reality, the checkpoint serves as a handy place for the soldiers to collect bribes from those who carry the minerals out of the militia’s territory. “We pay at every checkpoint coming and going: Every person who crosses pays 500 francs [about $1]. It’s not official but the province and district authorities know it,” said Olivier Mugaruka, who travels the rough roads of this region to buy tin, tungsten and coltan.

The soldiers also take a cut out of everything hauled out by legitimate miners such as Mr. Beningabo – an informal tax just like the 10 per cent he must pay to his village chief.

And that’s just small scale. In the next province of North Kivu, the infamous 85th brigade of the Congolese armed forces controls a huge cassiterite mine at Bisie, where it forces the local population to work. Although Congolese civil society organizations and media have repeatedly shown that the brigade controls the mine – and pockets the revenue from it – work continues undisturbed, and the tin is exported through both legal and illegal channels.

“We can only conclude that these activities are sanctioned at the highest levels,” said Patrick Alley, director of the British-based organization Global Witness, which has made extensive study of Congo’s mineral industry.

The profit to be had from mining – either from selling minerals, or “taxing” the trade – means the army (most of whose soldiers have not been paid in years by the central government in Kinshasa) has no incentive to move against the rebels, despite having pledged in multiple peace accords to do so. The rebels have no interest in moving either. “The FDLR have consolidated their economic base,” Mr. Alley said. “Their trading activities have become an end in themselves. They have set up such efficient and lucrative business networks that they have little incentive to leave.”

So each group insists it can’t demobilize while its various enemies are still encamped, and each works to defend and expand its territory – especially now, as crashing metal prices force them to increase output.

Organizations such as Global Witness have repeatedly called on mineral buyers, both local and international, to stop dealing with Congolese rebel forces. But Mark Patzelt, an Austrian who runs Skapa Mining & Trading, a tin ore export company (known as a comptoir) in Goma, insisted he has no way of knowing which of the minerals that traders bring to him have been extracted by legal miners. “How can I tell who is legitimate?” he asked. “When it gets to me, it’s changed hands so many times, and the trader will tell me anything I want to hear, that he bought from legitimate sources.”

Mr. Mugaruka, the Bukavu-based trader, is a good illustration of the problem. He insists, in a first discussion, that he buys only from ordinary miners, that dealing with the rebels is too dangerous. When pressed, however, he eventually admits that in order to survive in his small-scale business, which barely feeds and clothes his family, he must go where the quality minerals are, and the rebel groups working in the bush are happy to sell to him in exchange for salt or cloth he brings in.

One way to ensure the comptoir is not buying illegal minerals – blood tin, as it were – would be, of course, to stop trading here entirely. But Mr. Patzelt said that waiting for the conflict to end, before working in mining in Congo, is unrealistic. “It’s not as easy as, ‘Get out of the business and wait.’ There’s a huge investment here: half a million dollars. We opened up in 2006 and started making losses. You can’t just pack up and walk out of here – you have to continue until you get out of the loss.”

Owners say that a comptoir operating in Goma or Bukavu typically pays “fees” to no fewer than 14 different branches of government, including the secret police. The finance ministry demands 30 per cent of the value of what they export; the mining ministry takes 10 per cent.

But a huge quantity of Congo’s minerals are not exported that way. Traders work with smugglers to take them out through Rwanda – either in small boats across Lake Kivu, or in trucks of “tomatoes” that cross the land borders. Border guards, who officially earn about $40 a month, are rarely paid, and so for a small fee they are happy not to search below the top layer of tomatoes or charcoal. It costs about $350 to smuggle out a tin shipment that costs $17,000 to send legally, exporters said. “Everyone knows – the cassiterite comes from [this region] and goes to Bukavu and on to Rwanda directly,” said Mr. Kakez, the administrator. “Rwanda has no minerals in its own soil, but look at the list of its exports each year. So many minerals.”

And everyone in government knows exactly how this chain – of rebel miners, assisted by the military, smuggling out to Rwanda – works, and plenty are profiting from it, he said. “Their incentive is to maintain the informal minerals trade; that’s their way of staying rich.”

Mr. Nyamugusha, the provincial mining minister, agreed that “there’s a very large amount of fraud” and said he believes that 200 to 300 kilograms of gold leaves his province each month, in small quantities, for Rwanda and Uganda. The official export of gold? None.

The minister believes the solution for gradually isolating the rebel groups and expanding the legitimate mining industry is investment by companies such as Canada’s Banro Corp., which hopes to start operations here at several sites next year. The international companies will employ people (including the demobilized former rebel soldiers who are tempted back to illegal activity because they have no way of supporting themselves) and they will provide security around their operations, and enlist the help of local communities, Mr. Nyamugusha said. “The hope for the country is industrial exploitation like Banro’s,” he said.

But Mr. Patzelt said he wonders how many companies will be up to the challenge Banro has taken on. “The only solution for these regions is a serious inflow of capital and infrastructure,” he said. “But in order to do that you need electricity, water, legal security. Who is going to invest millions of dollars … without that?”

Congo Update – As Congo Rebels Advance, Protesters Throw Rocks at U.N. Compound (The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/world/africa/28congo.html
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — Hundreds of furious protesters hurled rocks at a United Nations compound in eastern Congo on Monday in frustration that peacekeepers have not halted the rebel advance that is sweeping the countryside.

The rebels are now in control of several major towns and the headquarters of a national park where endangered mountain gorillas live in the middle of a shrinking ring of safety.

Jaya Murthy, a spokesman for Unicef in the eastern Congo city of Goma, said heavy fighting was raging in several areas between government troops and rebel forces under the command of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general who says he is fighting to protect ethnic Tutsis.

Mr. Murthy said the conflict was spawning a vast wave of internally displaced people, with tens of thousands fleeing battle zones, often for the second or third time in recent months. As many as 250,000 people have been driven from their homes since the fighting between the rebels and government forces intensified in August.

“We’re on alert,” Mr. Murthy said. “We’re not sure what’s in store for the future, but whatever it is, it’s not good.”

Mr. Nkunda has rejected several cease-fires brokered by the United Nations. Recently, he threatened to take his war all the way to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, on the other side of the country.

His forces are much better trained and equipped than the government troops, who are notorious for turning their rusty guns on civilians but fleeing when facing a real threat. On Sunday, Mr. Nkunda’s forces seized a government army base, for the second time in recent weeks.

Several Western aid workers who spoke by phone from Goma on Monday described a panicky atmosphere, with the rebels gobbling up territory in the hills above Goma and Westerners hunkering down in their compounds, fearful of stepping outside.

According to United Nations officials, the protest started Monday morning around 9 after Congolese activists organized a large crowd to march on the United Nations headquarters in Goma. The protest quickly degenerated into violence, with demonstrators pelting the compound and nearby United Nations cars with large stones. There were mixed reports about casualties, with some Congolese officials reporting that the United Nations peacekeepers had killed two protesters in an attempt to quell the crowd. A spokesman for the United Nations peacekeepers was unable to be reached immediately.

The violence in eastern Congo has continued unabated for several years now, despite the presence of the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops.

“The population is not happy with the U.N.,” Mr. Murthy said. “They feel they are not protected. They are getting extremely angry.”

In Congo, a doctor keeps helping as rape victims keep coming (Christian Science Monitor)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1025/p01s01-woaf.html

A peace treaty has not stopped the rape as a weapon of war. Aid from Europe is drying up. But Denis Mukwege’s efforts to help Congolese women hasn’t flagged.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Bukavu, Democratic Republic Of Congo – As a senior surgeon at a hospital in war-torn eastern Congo, Denis Mukwege expected that his workload would ease when a peace treaty was signed earlier this year.

But while the war ended on paper, it continued on the ground. The combatants kept their weapons. They dug in, and took out their aggressions on local villagers.

Dr. Mukwege is a gynecologist. The majority of his patients are rape victims. And Congo, home of the world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, also has the globe’s highest incidence of rape.

“It is always a joy when you treat someone and they get well, and you see them, for the first time, smile again,” says Mukwege, resting after a long day of reconstructive surgery on rape victims at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. “But then I start seeing women I treated in 2003, and I ask myself, why should I continue with this work?”

He sighs. “I can’t be discouraged by the work if the problem will end. But if you can’t see the end….”

For more than a decade, Dr. Mukwege and his small team of assistants at Panzi Hospital have fought a small war of their own to help women recover their dignity as well as their health, during a long regional conflict that has turned gang rape into a weapon of war. The conflict shows few signs of stopping.

A peace treaty brokered by the European Union in January, and signed by dozens of armed groups – including the Rwandan rebel group responsible for the Rwandan genocide of 1994 – fell apart quickly on charges of government insincerity. Among the first victims to come to Panzi Hospital were once again the victims of rape – a crime of intimidation against Congolese communities, and often carried out in public to spread fear among the local population.

“Everyone says the war in Congo is complicated. It’s not complicated. It’s an economic war that’s been fought on the bodies of women. It is the systematic destruction of the female population of the Congo, and it’s conscious and it’s intentional,” says Eve Ensler, an American playwright and founder of V-Day, a women’s rights group.

“I’m here to say we can do something – we can end impunity, we can arrest war criminals who are orchestrating this war from abroad … and we can support building a huge women’s movement on the ground.”

Ensler heads up a funding effort for Panzi Hospital called “City of Joy,” which creates a safe environment for rape victims to live and get job training.

Rape victims say they have difficulty returning to normal lives. If they are married, their husbands often reject them for having sex (even involuntarily) with another man. If they bear children, their children are often rejected by their families and local communities. Children whose mothers have been raped by Rwandan rebels are particularly reviled, and are often called “the children of snakes.”

Bernadette Mushagalusa, a middle-aged mother of eight, was one of 12 people kidnapped from her village of Budodo in 2006 by members of the FDLR – a remnant band of Rwandan Hutus who took refuge in Congo after carrying out the genocide of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda. During her month in captivity, she was raped repeatedly. While her husband borrowed money to pay a ransom for her release, he rejected her when she finally came home.

“He said he doesn’t want any woman who was the wife of a Hutu,” Ms. Mushagalusa says simply, at a Catholic Church center in the town of Kaniola where she receives counseling and job training. “It’s not just him. All the people in the village laugh at me.”

Another young woman, who gives her name as Esperance, or Hope, says she was forced to become a “war bride” of an FDLR rebel during a joint looting raid of her village of Budodo by FDLR and the Congolese Army. She was kept for eight months, but when she became pregnant, her “husband” lost interest in her and she escaped.

At Panzi Hospital, Mukwege makes the rounds to check up on his patients. Since 1998, the hospital has performed reconstructive surgery on 21,000 rape victims. Mukwege says this is just a small percentage of the total of rape cases in the region.

When he started out, Mukwege was the only gynecologist in all of eastern Congo, but now he has trained a few younger doctors to handle simpler cases. The new doctors couldn’t have arrived at a better time. After a brief reprieve when the peace agreement was signed, raped women have been coming from all over the region since fighting broke out again Aug. 28. Most of the cases, Mukwege says, are public rapes, where even family members are forced to participate, at gunpoint.

Mukwege, the son of a Pentecostalt minister, sees his work as a kind of mission. He performs 10 surgeries per week.

He stops to talk with one of his patients, Mateso Nabutonze, who has been operated on five times since being kidnapped and raped by Rwandan rebels five years ago in the forests near her village. Mukwege is gentle and teasing, like a father, and he leaves Ms. Nabutonze giggling.

“These women, when they come to me, and say ‘Papa, ça va?’ (Are you well?), I wonder, what have I done to be in good health?” Mukwege says, his eyes tearing up. “How could I abandon girls like this when they are already abandoned? They have no reason to be happy, but they have a certain strength, and I don’t have it.”

His workload is heavy. But his supplies are diminishing. The European Community recently told Panzi Hospital that it would end its annual grant, which paid for a sizeable portion of the medical supplies for Mukwege’s work, because the EC wants to focus its funds on conflict zones, and the Congo, at least officially, is at peace.

Yet Mukwege says he has no plans to stop his work. “I get more from these women than I give them,” he says. “Their joy is my leitmotif.”

How to help

V-Day – a global women’s rights group started by playwright Eve Ensler (“The Vagina Monologues”), has organized City of Joy, a funding drive for rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

www.vday.org/drcongo

SAFER, Social Aid for the Elimination of Rape – a Canadian group that is helping Panzi Hospital to meet its financial needs.

www.saferworld.ca/

The Stephen Lewis Foundation – a Canadian group that funds projects in sub-Saharan Africa with a special focus on HIV/AIDS. The foundation has a fund drive for Panzi Hospital.

www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/panzi.htm

V TO THE TENTH LEADERSHIP FUND (Gambit Weekly)

New Orleans, Gambit Weekly has featured V-Day’s V TO THE TENTH Leadership
Fund in their ‘Bouquets & Brickbats’ section. The fund was given a “Bouquet”
by the paper and listed as “Best of the Week” online at
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/current/bouqbrix.php

The V TO THE TENTH Leadership Fund ?is giving $400,000 to 45 women and three
organizations from New Orleans and the Gulf South for their dedication,
sacrifice and hard work. V TO THE TENTH, a two-day celebration of the 10th
anniversary of The Vagina Monologues, was held in April and raised more than
$750,000. Part of the money was dedicated to scholarships, replanting marsh
grass and arranging for 1,200 women displaced by the levee failures to
attend the April event.

‘They wanted to destroy my body and spirit’ (CNN.com)

By John Blake

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/10/15/congo.women/index.html

(CNN) — Eve Ensler can’t find the right words to describe what she’s seen and heard.
A Congolese rape victim recovers at a hospital. Rape victims often face widespread rejection.

“Obscene. Horrible. Out of control….” The activist tosses out a cluster of angry words, trying to describe what is, in some ways, indescribable.

She talks about a woman being gang-raped by 15 soldiers. Some violated with sticks and knives. Cannibalism. She has returned from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where thousands of women and girls have been systematically raped during a 10-year war that some say has cost more lives than any other war since World War II.

“It’s ‘femicide,’ ” Ensler says, using another word to describe the treatment of Congolese women. “It’s the systematic destruction of women. It’s an economic war fought on the bodies of women. It’s the destruction of the Congolese people and life itself.”

Ensler and others are trying to stop the gruesome attacks against women by launching a series of campaigns that pivot on what Ensler says is a debatable premise — people will care what happens to dark-skinned Africans.

The centerpiece of Ensler’s campaign is “The City of Joy,” an all-female village in Congo where rape victims can recover from their physical and psychological wounds. Other groups such as UNICEF have mounted similar efforts to empower Congolese women and encourage the world to act.

The world’s reaction has been muted so far and Ensler, best-known as the playwright of “The Vagina Monologues,” says she knows why.

“A lot of it is flat-out racism,” she says. “When we see conflicts that involve white people, the world responds faster. Bosnia is a perfect example.”

Other Congo activists say the world hasn’t acted because they don’t know. People will respond once they hear the terrible stories, says Candice Knezevic, the “RAISE Hope for Congo” campaign manager for the Enough project, a group founded to end genocide and crimes against humanity.

“They are astonished and they care when you tell them,” Knezevic says. “I haven’t met a single person who doesn’t care about what’s happening in the Congo. The problem is so few know about it.”

Congo has long, bloody history

There seems to be so much to know. The history of Congo is as tangled and bloody as the complex war that engulfs it today.

Belguim ruled Congo from 1885 until it gained its independence in 1960. According to the CIA World Factbook, Congo has long been “marred by political and social instability.”

The Factbook’s dry description does not do justice to Congo’s gory history. Adam Hochschild, author of the prize-winning book, “King Leopold’s Ghost,” wrote that Belgian King Leopold murdered up to 8 million Congolese while robbing the country of ore and rubber at the beginning of the 20th century.

The struggle for control of Congo’s rich natural resources — the CIA Factbook says it is “endowed with vast potential wealth” in diamonds, gold and cobalt — has fueled much of the violence today, activists say.

Since 1998, various armed factions — tribal, rebel and militia — have fought for control of the country and its resources. UNICEF says the war has cost more lives than any other war since World War II.

Rape has become a primary weapon in that war, says Geoffrey Keele, a UNICEF spokesman. Keele says rape is designed to destroy the Congolese community. Husbands, families and villages often shun rape victims. A weak and divided community is easier to conquer.

“Rape is designed not just to injure and dehumanize the women but impact their families and communities,” Keele says.

Keele says UNICEF has established at least 90 forums throughout eastern Congo this year to educate women about their rights and encourage rape victims to talk about their abuse.

Congolese women have traditionally held such low status that many expect violence from their husbands and men, Keele says.

“A lot of the women we talked to had said that this is just their lot in life and it is something to be endured,” he says.

Turning ‘pain into power’

The City of Joy is designed to change that attitude. It is the product of a partnership with UNICEF and V-Day, a global movement Ensler launched to end violence against women and girls. The city, which Ensler hopes to open in September 2009, will offer counseling, education and entrepreneurial training to rape victims.

Ensler says she’s met plenty of Congolese women who are primed to “turn their pain into power.” Some are already risking their lives to report their rape and stand up to men, she says.

“These are the strongest and most incredible women on the planet,” Ensler says.

They are women like Lumo Furaha who recently told V-Day why she decided to talk publicly about the time scores of armed men raped her repeatedly.

“They wanted to destroy me; destroy my body and kill my spirit,” she recalled. “I am speaking out because I don’t want any child of the next generation to have to live through what I have lived through.”

It may be too late, however, for Furaha’s wish to come true. Congo’s next generation is already being twisted, Ensler says.

She says many boys have been forced to watch their mothers and sisters raped. She wonders what kind of men these boys will become if no one helps them sort through what they’ve seen.

“There is no place in the culture for a boy to say, ‘I feel powerless and broken,’ ” she says. “He becomes violent.”

Ensler says she saw a frightening example of that ripple effect during her last trip to Congo. She was in a hospital when nurses brought in a 3-year-old girl who had been raped — by two 10-year-old boys.

Congo’s future, she says, may look even more frightening than its past.

“What’s going on in the Congo is so extreme and so out of control,” she says, “that if we don’t intervene on behalf of women there, it will spread and something much more horrible will happen.

“You cannot let something that inhuman go on.”

“Rape again rampant in Congo.” Globe & Mail (Toronto)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081017.wcongo18/BNS…

By: STEPHANIE NOLEN

KANIOLA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO — In Kaniola, they have coined a new term: reviolé.

Re-raped.

At the Catholic parish office, on the cramped and crowded ledger pages where they list rape victims, at least half the names appear more than once: women who have been victims of sexual enslavement or public gang rape by rebel groups or the Congolese army; women, 30 in an average month, who have come to the parish to get help reaching a hospital to repair their injuries; women who have been healed, come home and a year or two or three later, been gang-raped again, during another small surge of the conflict.

The youngest victim on the list is 6. The oldest is 74.
A woman has her hair braided last year in a centre for rape victims in the Congo.
Enlarge Image

A woman has her hair braided last year in a centre for rape victims in the Congo. (Lionel Healing/AFP/Getty Images)
The Globe and Mail

The epidemic of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, without doubt the most horrific and persistent abuse of women anywhere in the world, has flared in a vicious new outbreak in recent weeks with renewed fighting in the country’s troubled eastern region.

Mass rape began here with the civil war in 1996. That conflict quickly sucked in all of Congo’s neighbours, and killed an estimated five million people. “And it brought systematic, planned, ordered, collective public rape – rape used as a weapon of war – it is a war within a war,” said Mathilde Muhindo, who heads Centre Olame, one of Congo’s oldest women’s organizations, founded nearly 50 years ago. Rape was used as a tactic by every single armed force here – each with their signature style: some raped women with guns and shot them off as a finale, some raped girls, some forced sons to rape mothers.

Congo moved into a fragile peace in 2003, and the rate of rape declined. Much of the country came under the nominal control of the central government – but not the volatile, mineral-rich east, home to no fewer than 23 armed groups. Here the conflict simmered for years, and flared once again into full-on fighting in late August because, it seems, a glacial peace process threatened to cut off warlords and neighbouring-country governments from their access to the illegal mineral trade.

With the fighting came a resurgence of rape. Admissions at the two hospitals in the east that can repair the injuries of rape victims have spiked in the past six weeks. Many more victims are assumed to be, as in previous years, trapped deep in the bush, cut off from help by the lack of roads, lack of transport, lack of any money or by the fighting.

That fills Congo’s women with panicked despair.

“When will it end?” Ms. Muhindo asked. “This is shameful, not just for Congo, but for all humanity.”

Since The Globe and Mail published one of the first in-depth examinations of Congo’s epidemic of rape four years ago, the gravity of the situation has become better known internationally, with more media coverage, more investigations by human-rights organizations and even charities formed abroad – such as Social Aid For the Elimination of Rape (SAFER) at the University of Toronto – to support Congolese rape survivors.

Where, four years ago, no one in eastern Congo wanted to talk about rape, today there are local organizations ostensibly dedicated to caring for victims in nearly every town, and much more donor funding available for the issue; la lutte contre la violence sexuelle has, in fact, become something of a cottage industry here.

And yet for Congolese women, almost nothing has changed. There is a better system in place to refer them for medical care, as the Kaniola parish does. And that is it.

Places such as this town, which is near the edge of a vast national park, are all but under the control of a Rwandan rebel group made up mostly of remnants of the interahamwe, the Hutu militia that committed Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 then fled into Congo. They routinely descend on Kaniola to pillage goods and abduct women whom they force-march up to their forest base camp and sexually enslave, submitting them to brutal, daily rape, sometimes branding their buttocks for amusement.

“On a Friday in September, 2007, I heard a knocking on the door in the night and a voice told us to open and when we did, they caught me,” said Esperance, who was a 19-year-old student at teacher’s college when she was abducted. She did not give her surname. “One tied me to him with a length of cloth so I could not run. They took all our cows, and they took me.” She was held by the militia for eight months, until she was heavily pregnant and they were paying her less attention and she found a chance to slip away and run for home.

Esperance, who hunches over her knees and rocks back and forth when she’s not speaking, remembers one other detail about the night she was taken: the interahamwe were accompanied by soldiers she recognized, members of a Congolese army brigade stationed nearby. After the combined forces looted her whole village, they moved up the road and divided the spoils, before the soldiers went back to their posts and the rebels dragged her up into the forest.

That was not an aberration: Congolese soldiers are frequently implicated in rapes, and the Congolese government, both feeble and uninterested, has done nothing to address the problem.

“The issue is not taken seriously by those in power – the state doesn’t get involved,” said Vénantie Bisimua, who founded the Network of Women for the Defence of Rights and Peace in eastern Congo. “The rape here has never been discussed in parliament or by cabinet. Our penal code still doesn’t include being raped with a gun or an object, or being shot in the vagina. We have a weak administration in a dysfunctional situation and they think it’s a women’s problem; they have other priorities.”

Kaniola sits just a half-hour’s drive down the road from a large base of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo – known by its French acronym MONUC – the largest in the world with 17,000 peacekeepers. But none of them were around the night Esperance was taken.

“We have a MONUC base but we can’t turn to them. When we have a problem they say, ‘We are here for observation only,’“ said Marie-Jeanne Rwankuba, who maintains the Kaniola parish rape-victim ledger. In fact, the UN mission in Congo has a Chapter 7 mandate from the Security Council that authorizes it to use any means necessary to protect civilians. It almost never does.

International groups have tried to bolster the judicial system in eastern Congo, in the hope of prosecuting rapists, and organizations such as Ms. Bisimua’s have tried to help women file cases. “But it’s difficult to do many dossiers because we can’t identify the perpetrators, and when we do take forward a case, the victims find it does little for them – it’s a long process, it takes place far from their homes and there’s no guarantee of their security,” she said. “If convicted, the perpetrator may go to prison for a short term, but the prison is essentially open and he can walk out. No one is punished.”

But ending rape here depends on more than pushing the state to protect or prosecute. “Unless the war ends and unless the militias stop fighting, we will be sewing up vaginas for eternity – and unless the foreign governments who are benefiting from the resources in the Congo face pressure to cease the fighting and withdraw the troops, we will be here forever,” said Eve Ensler, the New York playwright best known as the creator of The Vagina Monologues, who has become an impassioned advocate for Congo’s women over the past two years.

“Everyone says the war in Congo is complicated. It is not complicated – it’s an economic war that has been fought on the bodies of women – it is the systematic destruction of the female population of the Congo – and it’s conscious and it’s intentional,” she said in a telephone interview from London, where she was lobbying on the issue last week.

Ms. Ensler’s organization, V-Day, in partnership with Unicef, has organized truth-telling sessions in 90 villages, where women stand up to tell what happened to them, forcing men, particularly officials, to acknowledge the rapes. They have staged street demonstrations, and are working on a list of demands for women’s safety and a possible civil-disobedience campaign. Congo’s government must do more, she said, but international action is also crucial, including the arrest of “war criminals orchestrating this war from abroad.”

There is no sign, to date, of any such moves. Rebel troops are now on the move across the eastern part of the country, and as each group takes new territory, there is more rape. At least 100,000 people have been displaced by the renewed fighting, yet for many women, the place they seek shelter is no safer than the one they left.

Esperance is staying put in Kaniola, for now; she lives with her infant daughter, born weeks after she escaped the rebels, and her mother. Her father was killed by rebels years before, and after the night last year that her home was looted, the two women and baby girl have no money to go anywhere else.

“I’m really afraid because the interahamwe are still in the bush,” she said. “And if they come back, they may take me again.”

Rape Victims’ Words Help Jolt Congo Into Change (The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world/africa/18congo.html?hp

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

BUKAVU, Congo — Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.

“There was no dinner,” she said.

“It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”

The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.

Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem, which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world. Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land and many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.

After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.

European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.

The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.

In Bunia, a town farther north, rape prosecutions are up 600 percent compared to five years ago. Congolese investigators have even been flown to Europe to learn “CSI”-style forensic techniques. The police have arrested some of the most violent offenders, often young militia men, most likely psychologically traumatized themselves, who have thrust sticks, rocks, knives and assault rifles inside women.

“We’re starting to see results,” said Pernille Ironside, a United Nations official in eastern Congo.

The number of those arrested is still tiny compared to the perpetrators on the loose, and often the worst offenders are not caught because they are marauding bandits who attack villages in the night, victimize women and then melt back into the forest.

This is all happening in a society where women tend to be beaten down anyway. Congolese women do most of the work —at home, in the fields and in the market, where they carry enormous loads of bananas on their bent backs — and yet they are often powerless. Many women who are raped are told to keep quiet. Often, it is a shame for the entire family, and many rape victims have been kicked out of their villages and turned into beggars.

Grassroots groups are trying to change this culture, and they have started by encouraging women who have been raped to speak out in open forums, like a courtroom full of spectators, just with no accused.

At the event in Bukavu in mid-September, Ms. Kizende drew tears — and cheers. It seems that the taboo against talking about rape is beginning to lift. Many women in the audience wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: “I refuse to be raped. What about you?”

Dozens of activists are fanning out to villages on foot and by bicycle to deliver a simple but often novel message: rape is wrong. Men’s groups are even being formed.

But these improvements are simply the first, tentative steps of progress in a very troubled country.

United Nations officials said the number of rapes had appeared to be decreasing over the past year. But the recent upsurge of fighting between the Congolese government and rebel groups, and all the violence and predation that goes with it, is jeopardizing those gains.

“It’s safer today than it was,” said Euphrasie Mirinidi, a woman who was raped in 2006. “But it’s still not safe.”

Poverty, chaos, disease and war. These are the constants of eastern Congo. Many people believe the rape problem will not be solved until the area tastes peace. But that might not be anytime soon.

Laurent Nkunda, a well-armed Tutsi warlord, or a savior of his people, depending on whom you ask, recently threatened to wage war across the country. Clashes between his troops, many of them child soldiers, and government forces have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in the past few months. His forces, along with those from the dozens of other rebel groups hiding out in the hills, are thought to be mainly responsible for the epidemic of brutal rapes.

United Nations officials say that the most sadistic rapes are committed by depraved killers who participated in Rwanda’s genocide in 1994, and then escaped into Congo. These attacks have left thousands of women with their insides destroyed. But the Congolese National Army, a ragtag undisciplined force of teenage troops who sport wrap-around shades and rusty rifles, has also been blamed. The government has been slow to punish its own, but Congolese generals recently announced they would set up new military tribunals to prosecute government soldiers accused of rape.

No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why Congo’s rape problem is the worst in the world. The attacks continue despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Impunity is thought to be a big factor, which is why there is now so much effort on bolstering Congo’s creaky and often corrupt justice system. The sheer number of armed groups spread over thousands of miles of thickly forested territory, fighting over Congo’s rich mineral spoils, also makes it incredibly difficult to protect civilians.

The ceaseless instability has held the whole eastern swath of the country hostage.

In Bukavu, everywhere you look, something is broken: a railing, a window, a pickup cruising around with no fenders, a woman trudging along the road with no eyes.

The Congolese government admits it is at a loss, especially in keeping women safe.

“Every day women are raped,” said Louis Leonce Muderhwa, the governor of South Kivu Province. “This isn’t peace.”

Activists from overseas have been pouring in. Few are more passionate than Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which has been performed in more than 100 countries. She came to Congo last month to work with rape victims.

“I have spent the past ten years of my life in the rape mines of the world,” she said. “But I have never seen anything like this.”

She calls it “femicide,” a systematic campaign to destroy women.

Ms. Ensler is helping open a center in Bukavu called the City of Joy, which will provide counseling to rape victims as well as teach leadership skills and self-defense. Her hope is to build an army of rape survivors who will push with an urgency — that has so far been absent — for a solution to end Congo’s ceaseless wars.

The City of Joy is rising behind Panzi Hospital, where the worst of the worst rape cases are treated. But even this refuge has come under attack. Last month, an irate mob stormed the hospital. The mob demanded that the doctors give them the body of a thief, so it could be burned. When the doctors refused, several angry young men beat up nurses and smashed windows. But it was not clear if the body was the only thing that had set them off.

“They don’t like our work,” said Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist. “Maybe what we’re doing is disturbing people.”

The stories of these rapes are clearly disturbing. But that is the point, to shake people up and grab their attention.

“The details are the scariest part,” Ms. Ensler said.

At the event last month, many people in the audience covered their mouths as they listened. Some could not bear it and burst out of the room crying.

One speaker, Claudine Mwabachizi, told how she was kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her. “A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves,” she said.

She was going public, she said, “to free my sisters.”

But Congo, if anything, is a land of contrasts. The soil here is rich but the people are starving. The minerals are limitless but the government is broke.

After the speaking-out event was over, Ms. Mwabachizi said she felt exhausted.

But, she added, “I feel strong.”

She was given a pink shawl with a message printed on it.

“I have survived,” it read. “I can do anything.”

Europe said to ignore mass rape of women, children in Congo

http://www.neurope.eu/articles/90152.php

A combination of racism, sexism and vested interests are preventing the European Union and US government acting effectively against the Congolese militia’s tactics of mass rape of women and children was the conclusion of a conference held in Brussels by the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE).

The plight of women and children is even worse than it was in Rwanda during the genocide according to speakers at the conference. They said the struggle and suffering of these women is invisible and must be addressed to prevent the long term results being devastating for the country.

Participants urged the EU to take notice that “this is not a battle by women for women, it is a battle for humanity by humanity.” MEP Renate Weber of Romania,) co-chair of the seminar and a member of the Development Committee in the European Parliament said: “This is an emergency! As we speak, women are systematically destroyed in DRC through dreadful sexual and psychological torture. The impunity of the perpetrators must be stopped. We have to act now because the future of a nation is at stake, the future of our own humanity is at stake!”

The seminar heard disturbing first hand examples from the director of the ground breaking Panzi Hospital in the DRC, Dr Denis Mukwege of the atrocities allegedly being perpetrated. Eve Ensler, author and playwright and founder of V-Day, a global movement that supports anti-violence organisations throughout the world also made a powerful contribution with her account of the crimes currently being carried out, participants said.

Ensler has just returned from the DRC, where she spent a month in North and South Kivu. The French presidency was represented by Jean-Bernard Bolvin, adviser to Rama Yade, French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who said the French presidency will help, but didn’t say how. MEP Sophie in’t Veld of the Netherlands), the other co-chair, said: “Until you hear the stories you have no idea how bad things are, it goes beyond anything you can imagine but we have to leave emotions aside and focus on action. The European Parliament can be instrumental in raising awareness; we cannot close our eyes to this anymore. Violence against women seems to be perceived by large sectors of society to be normal but this should no longer be considered as a women’s issue but a human rights issue.” The EU last year praised the government of Congo for conducting elections that were relatively free of trouble, but critics have said this has blinded Europe from taking action against continued atrocities.