The West, led by the United States, has been incessantly pounding Libya in the name of humanity the last few days. Saving humanity, so we are told. Yet, the gravest humanitarian crisis of our times remains grossly neglected by the same self-righteous nations. If the rape of 400,000 girls and women in a 12-month period is not a humanitarian catastrophe, what on earth can be one? If the rape of 1.8 million women in the 15-year Democratic Republic of Congo conflict is not macabre, what on earth can be?
These numbers are not the figment of one’s imagination. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health Thursday, says that more than 400,000 women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 were raped in the vast, war-ravaged country in central Africa during a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007. This is 26 times more than the 15,000 women that the United Nations had reported (October 2010) were raped there during the same period. Even this count, the authors aver, is an acutely conservative estimate. This figure does not include sexual assaults on females under 15 or over 49. It also does not include rapes of boys and men. The actual number, therefore, can be anyone’s guess.
The effort of the researchers led by Amber Peterman, a gender development specialist at the International Food Policy Research Institute, is laudable. They worked in their free time, and received no donor support. Most other estimates on sexual violence in DRC have been specific to certain regions and/or relied on data collected from health centres, hospitals, police, or other authorities and service providers. That is, they relied on victims coming forward themselves. Peterman’s data source however is internationally recognised and the report has been produced in collaboration with the DRC government.
This report is not to be seen in terms of the numbers alone, but also in the backdrop of what’s happening around the world today. Leave the Libya bombing aside for a moment.
On May 4, 2011, judges in Stuttgart, Germany, began hearing evidence against Ignace Murwanashyaka and Straton Musoni, president and vice-president respectively of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, FDLR). FDLR, a predominately Rwandan Hutu group, has been operating in eastern Congo under various names since 1994.
The two FDLR leaders were arrested on November 17, 2009 in Germany, where they had been living for several years. They are charged with 26 counts of crimes against humanity and 39 counts of war crimes committed by FDLR troops on Congolese territory between January 2008 and November 2009.
For years, FDLR troops conducted widespread and brutal attacks against civilians in Congo. These, according to Human Rights Watch, intensified in 2009 following Congolese army military operations against FDLR with the backing of the Rwandan army and later United Nations peacekeepers. Human Rights Watch documented numerous deliberate killings of civilians by FDLR. FDLR combatants pillaged and burned homes, sometimes with their victims locked inside. FDLR attacks were regularly accompanied by rape. Most victims were gangraped, with combatants deliberately using sexual violence as a weapon of war, Human Rights Watch found. Murwanashyaka and Musoni were not in DRC at the time, but were known to be closely communicating with and ordering operations by FDLR troops.
The horrors perpetrated by FDLR had also been documented in the UN report. But as UN reports go, it did not fix the blame on individuals. It only described the role of all the main Congolese and foreign parties responsible – including military or armed groups from Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and Angola. A draft of the report was leaked to the media in August 2010. The Rwandan government, whose soldiers were accused of some of the most heinous crimes, threw a fit, and threatened to pull its peacekeepers out of UN missions if the world body published the report.
The UN poster boy of the late Nineties, Paul Kagame, was definitively indicted. His Rwandan troops were accused of massacring Hutu refugees who had fled to neighbouring Zaire, now DRC, after the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus that had left over 800,000 people dead. Kagame's forces ended the Tutsi war crimes and became a hero. But as in most African countries, he eventually became a tyrant too. The man who ended one genocide, stood charged with having led a retaliatory one.
Kagame still remains in the good books of the United States, and therefore all of the West’s bellicose nations, for all practical purposes. The West continues to ignore Kagame’s war crimes, and refuses to provide succour to the women of DRC. The country could not make it to the priority list for international aid. In fact, when writer Eve Ensler went to solicit US First Lady Michele Obama’s support, she was told by a White House official that “Congo was not going to be part of the Michelle brand.” Seriously.
That brings us to US President Barack Obama. It was this same Obama, who as US Senator, on October 10, 2007, had written to Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to express his concerns about the growing number of sexual assaults against women in DRC. It was this same man who in December 2005 introduced The Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security and Democracy Promotion Act, which identifies such systematic sexual violence as a particular threat in Congo. The legislation was signed into law on December 22, 2006.
Obama even urged President George W Bush to address the Congo crisis in 2006. He wrote, “It's time the Administration stops ignoring the call by Congress to appoint a special envoy to the DRC, and strengthen the U.N. peacekeeping force which is working to stabilize the eastern part of the Congo. The seriousness of the situation there was recently highlighted by devastating reports about the escalation of sexual violence against women in the region.” He also asked Secretary of State Rice for answers as to how the US government would help curb the violence.
That was then.
Today Obama has other priorities. He needs to stay focussed on the oil-rich Middle East. The US needs Libya more than it does the gangraped women of DRC.
PS: But there's hope still. And, thankfully, it is not Obama-centric.
