By Emily Geminder
24 June 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo is often called a forgotten war. Its death toll is higher than any conflict since World War II – 5.4 million since the start of the fighting in 1998. According to television analyst Andrew Tyndall, in the past year, the three major U.S. broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted a total of eleven minutes to the ongoing conflict.
But Congo is also home to another of history’s gravest silences: mass sexual violence as a tactic of war.
Nowhere is the scope of the violence more apparent than at Panzi Hospital. If women make it there and, upon arriving, are among those waiting who are able to gain admittance, they are the rare few. The East Congo hospital began addressing the growing need for vaginal reconstruction as a result of sexual violence in 1998. The first reconstruction was a woman who had been gang-raped by soldiers. Afterwards, one inserted a rifle into her vagina and fired it.
Today the hospital is East Congo’s leading site of referral for sexual violence survivors, who constitute over two thirds of its patients. Many have long-term medical damage such as fistula and chronic incontinence. In certain parts of East Congo, it is estimated that three out of four women have been raped.
Last month, addressing the Wilton Park high-level conference on the role of peacekeepers in countering violence against women, the United Nations Force Commander for the Democratic Republic of the Congo Major General Patrick Cammaert remarked, “It is more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier right now in Eastern DRC.”
Officially, the war in Congo ended five years ago. But the numbers tell a different story – the rates of death before and after the civil war’s supposed end are virtually indistinguishable. Amid continued fighting between local ethnic groups, proxy militias supported by neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, breakaway factions of the national army, and thinly spread United Nations forces, words like ceasefire and elections carry little legitimacy. In the chaos, who is fighting whom and why gets blurry, and even UN peacekeepers have been implicated in the sole, unifying constant – sexual violence against women and children.
Evidence suggests that Congo is part of a larger trend: the past two decades have seen a marked rise in sexual violence as a military strategy. It also appears that the violence is becoming increasingly brutal. As the spaces that once distinguished combat from civilian life have diminished, the nature of combat has become characterized by violence employed to intimidate, terrorize and humiliate civilians, most commonly taking the form of sexual violence against women and children. Letitia Anderson, Program Associate for the UN Development Fund for Women’s Governance, Peace, and Security told MediaGlobal, “Far from being the random acts of a few renegade soldiers, sexual violence today is employed as a strategic means of achieving political and military ends.”
Up until now, the international community has failed to recognize rape as a security problem deserving a systematic security response. Instead, sexual violence has remained shrouded in the language of inevitability, dismissed as war’s regrettable collateral damage.
That may begin to change.
This week U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a special session of the UN Security Council to address the issue of violence against women in armed conflict. She said, “There has long been debate about whether or not sexual violence against women and girls in conflict constitutes a security issue. I am proud that today we respond to that lingering question with a resounding ‘yes.’”
According to Anderson, the resolution passed unanimously by the Security Council will serve as “recognition of the new character sexual violence has acquired in contemporary conflict and post-conflict settings.” Furthermore, the resolution will put into motion steps to ensure that sexual violence is countered with the same degree of response as any other global security threat.
“Beyond recognizing it as an issue, you have to say: What are the implications for defining sexual violence as a peace and security threat?” Erin Kenny, a gender-based violence specialist for the UN Population Fund, said in an interview with MediaGlobal.
Many of the implications center around the current absence of adequate resources and the dire need for increased funding. “My personal frustration is the lack of consistent funding put toward addressing sexual violence,” Kenny said. A great deal of the expense lies in capacity building, where the need for training, mentoring, and adequate data collection is huge. “This is a rather new field of work,” Kenny added, “and the level of expertise is still relatively low.”
She also stressed the need for more women peacekeepers. In Congo, for instance, women currently play a minimal role in all aspects of the peacekeeping and post-conflict negotiations that impact them. Addressing the Security Council, General Cammaert said, “Women who already live in fear of men due to sexual violence – often by men in uniform – are more likely to talk to other women.”
Philomène Omatuku Atshakawo, Congo’s Minister of Gender, Family and Children, said the epidemic levels of violence against women in her country had led to a feminization of poverty, noting that 50 percent of the victims are under 18 years of age. The Congolese Senate is poised to adopt a code on protection of children this week.
Speaking to the press recently about countering violence against women worldwide, UNIFEM Executive Director Ines Alberdi noted that two integral ingredients were historically missing in the fight: money and men. The notion takes a perverse slant in Congo.
Take the issue of money. An extensive report by the UN in 2001 detailed the ways Congo’s mineral wealth has fueled its conflict. Known for its diamonds and gold, Congo’s soil is also rich with coltan, short for colombo-tantalite, a key mineral in the production of cell phones and laptops. It sells for hundreds of dollars a pound, and Congo claims 80 percent of the global supply.
Who gains from the riches? The report counted a number of beneficiaries. First, the countries whose armed forces have propped up various militia factions – among them Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Burundi – have exported mass quantities of the mineral to the global market. Annual statistics from the government of Uganda, for instance, show that in 1997, a year before fighting broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2.5 tons of coltan were exported. In 1999, the figure jumped to 70 tons.
The report also cited dozens of international corporations as silently complicit, profiting from Congolese coltan.
As for the attitude of men, the report from the Wilton Park conference noted that in post-conflict situations such as Congo, the frequency of sexual violence often increases after the fighting comes to a supposed end. While it is possible that this points to a rise in the reporting of such attacks, the report noted that it may also reflect two other phenomena: “First, the committing of sexual violence on a widespread scale by civilian men, including demobilized combatants; and second, the continuation of inter-group conflict by other means.” The tradition of impunity for war-time rape is carried over to what the report calls “peace-time rape.”
“We’ve asked the UN to institute wider measures to address gender injustice — for instance, an end to impunity,” said Helen Scanlon, Africa Coordinator for the Gender Program of the International Center for Transitional Justice, speaking to MediaGlobal from South Africa. She also advocated the creation of an expert monitoring group to provide early warning to the Security Council in situations where women are at risk.
“Right now there are early warning signs in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe,” she said. In Ethiopia, human rights groups have reported that the military has been involved in a number of crimes against humanity in the Ogaden region – including sexual violence – as a method of war. It has been suggested that Zimbabwe’s recent upsurge in rape during the build-up to this week’s election is part of a concerted strategy to intimidate the population.
The International Crisis Group, an independent monitoring organization, says that any effort to address sexual violence will be undermined as long as traditions of impunity go unchallenged. While amnesty provisions are central to the creation of peace accords, they often translate into implicit tolerance of sexual violence. “Given widespread use of rape as a weapon of war,” the group said, “amnesties mean that men with guns forgive other men with guns for crimes against women and children.”