Ascent of Women (26 page)

The war in Congo has claimed 5.4 million lives since it began in 1997. The Red Cross says forty-five thousand more die every
month. The health system has collapsed. The economy is devastated. There isn’t even an intact road to get from one side of the country to the other, and the DRC is bigger than Europe. June 30, 2010, marked its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Belgium, and for most of those years it’s been convulsed by multiple wars, human rights abuses and appalling suffering.

Congo is the country that Joseph Conrad described in
Heart of Darkness
. It’s a place with lush but mountainous terrain and topsoil so fertile that you can kick a seed into the ground and have a plant by week’s end. The rush of growth is the botanical equivalent of insanity: banana fronds big enough to shelter a grown man; floral excesses of orchids, lobelias and lilies splashing the landscape in saucy orange, crimson and delicate pink while white datura lilies lift off the lush green vegetation reaching for the sun. The earth is so mineral rich that the hillsides literally sparkle as though studded with broken glass. Endangered mountain gorillas live in Virunga National Park. Thatch-roofed huts are beginning to give way to corrugated steel roofs, but women and girls still carry goods on their heads and gather to wash their clothes in the streams that babble through the villages. The countryside is enchanting. But it is also where the pickaxe of the mining industry has unearthed a scenario so horrible that it suggests the loss of stability has led to madness.

Although the UN says the war is on the wane, there’s nothing to celebrate yet. North and South Kivu have the richest mineral deposits in the world; seven different militias supposedly protect them, armed to the teeth, often drunk and guilty of atrocities against women and girls. The rapes and ongoing war are usually ascribed to ethnic revenge, the fault of the Interahamwe paramilitaries from Rwanda, who flooded into Congo seeking escape
from justice after the genocide; or it’s Ugandan and Rwandan militias intent on grabbing the country’s mineral wealth while the West looks on with complicity; or it’s the totally dysfunctional government of DRC’s president, Joseph Kabila, and his equally guilty military. In every scenario, gold, diamonds, coltan (used in cellphones and electronic tablets) and cassiterite (tin ore) are presented as the raison d’être for the militias and, as a result, the cause of the carnage for women. Rape is said to be retribution, an initiation ritual, a torture, a morale booster for troops, a means to humiliate and terrorize the population, a strategy for ethnic cleansing, a weapon of biological warfare for the spreading of HIV.

But who would rape a newborn baby to death for any of these reasons? Who would gang-rape a woman while forcing her terrified children to watch? Why on earth would a pair of soldiers believe that holding a woman down and slicing off her breasts with a machete would help protect mineral deposits? The wretched truth is this: in the absence of civility during the past dozen years of war, the men with the guns have descended into savagery. They bury people alive, draw and quarter their living, breathing captives, burn the villages they come across and rape and mutilate the women and girls.

And yet for the most part, the world is silent. Indeed, mention 5 million dead and hundreds of thousands of gang-raped women and children, and most people will say they had no idea.

Congolese women realize that their path out of this abyss is empowerment. But first they need to heal. Médecins Sans Frontières is on the front line of this war on women and has brought in therapists to deal with a population traumatized and reeling. The psychiatric therapy they bring is as valuable as the
battlefield surgery they’re better known for. Christina Henriques from Holland is one of the MSF mental health officers in Congo. She stays in Kitchanga, a village that’s deep in the bush about a four-hour drive from Goma, where she serves women who have escaped their burning villages and hidden in the nearby woods. Almost every one of them has been raped at least once.

Henriques met Siffy last June. “She was severely traumatized. Her reactions were psychotic. The only piece of her own identity she could recall was her age—the number ten. If I asked how many pencils were on the table, or how many people were in the room or how many candies she would like, the reply was always the same—
inchumi
, the Kenyan Rwandan word for ‘ten.’ It took three and a half weeks of ninety-minute sessions each day before she said her name.”

Henriques had heard Siffy’s story from her mother, Pascasie. It was much like every other story: the militia arrives in a village, they tell the men and boys to leave and shoot those who don’t, then set fire to the thatch-roofed huts, rape the women and girls, steal the livestock and move on. But in this case, Pascasie had received warning that they were coming and ran to the hut she kept in the forest as a refuge, bringing Siffy and her three-year-old grandson with her. The militia discovered their hideout. They told Pascasie they knew she had a pig at home and instructed her to go with two of the soldiers to get it, and to take her grandson with her. They kept Siffy and promised they wouldn’t harm her if her mother gave them her pig. Once they were back at the village, the soldiers whacked Pascasie across the back with a machete and told her to lie down. With her terrified grandson watching, first one then the other raped her. “When I got back to the hut in the woods, my daughter was gone. It was after I’d
found her and carried her back to the shelter, washed her and fed her, that I realized she was so traumatized she couldn’t speak. Six days later, we were strong enough to walk to another village. She started to have seizures and panicked whenever she saw men. When I heard about the therapist at MSF, I brought her here to Kitchanga.”

That’s where I met her—at the MSF therapy hut. Henriques handed Siffy a doll. She kept washing it over and over again, telling the therapist that the doll was dirty, that the monsters had hurt the doll. She was sweetly vulnerable and quick to smile, but she suffered from panic attacks and often thought there was someone chasing her. She drooled almost continuously, but when her mother reminded her to hold her saliva, she was able to, for a while. She held her right arm tucked into her side like a bird’s broken wing, but if you played high-five with her and suddenly switched from the left hand to the right, she poked that hand forward, not far, but the delighted look on her face made me think this blameless child might get her life back after all.

After the session, we walked to the hut where she lives with her mother in the woods outside Kitchanga and huddled on the soft earthen floor inside. Siffy had something she wanted to say, and she played with the buttons on her shirt while slowly getting to the point of a story that seemed to weigh like a stone on her shoulders. “There was shooting, a lot of shooting,” she said. “They hurt me,” she said again, as if to reassure herself that someone was listening. “The monsters have guns. They wear uniforms. They are soldiers. There was too much noise.” She stopped talking then. We exchanged another round of high-fives, and she gave me a smile so sweet that it was contagious.
Then it disappeared and Siffy leaned forward and said, “I’m still afraid of the monsters. They’re still in Kalembe. Someone needs to make them go away.”

~

One woman who came to Henriques’s clinic had witnessed her seven children and her husband being shot by the militia. After that, each of the men raped her in turn and she hoped she would die. When she didn’t, she asked her neighbours to kill her so she could be buried with her family. Another woman was rounded up with the rest of her village while soldiers set fire to their huts. Terrified, the villagers watched flames soar into the smoky sky as the huts burned to the ground. Then the soldiers opened fire. She survived simply because she was at the back of the pack and fell to the ground with the blood of her children and extended family running over her. She lay still until the brutes swaggered out of the village.

On a cloudy morning outside a cabin on the edge of the woods where they live, thirty-five women gathered in a circle with Henriques. They talked about their dreams of escape and the ghastly nightmares in which they relive the atrocities. They described the life of a typical Congolese woman. She does all the heavy lifting: she plants the crop, straps a tumpline to her forehead to carry back-breaking loads of charcoal and wood to sell in the city, she hauls the water and fetches firewood for her family. Yet here in the circle, the women, who were between the ages of twenty-two and seventy-five, told me, “We’re not equal to the men because we don’t wear the pants.” They spoke as one when they said, “We’re seen as worthless.”

But they also wanted to talk about how to change their condition. “No one says, ‘I’m sorry.’ No one apologizes. Husbands rape us, the military rape us, anyone can rape us. When men become soldiers here, they turn into animals. They want to kill us; it’s how men think.” When I asked the men hanging around in the nearby village why this happens, they offered appalling excuses: “Our commanders expect this of us; our women are away in Rwanda; if we don’t rape the women, the other men will think we aren’t real men.”

As the session drew to a close, one woman began to sing, her voice soaring into the treetops. Another woman joined her, then another. The Swahili words of the song meant “Thank you for bringing us together.” Soon the entire circle was singing. On the far side of the circle, a woman stood up to dance, then pulled me to my feet to join her. In a moment we were thirty-seven women dancing, singing, rejoicing in one another’s company—their experiences of brutality laid to rest for the moment.

With MSF, I drove farther into the province to Nyanzale, where there’d been a sudden increase in mass rape. At the MSF clinic at the top of the hill overlooking the village, a psychologist named Ange Mpala was trying to work miracles with survivors who were anxious, discouraged and exhausted. She said, “There’s physical pain in the back and the stomach when you’ve been raped. The victims feel dirty and wounded deep inside. They all need treatment within seventy-two hours to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” But shame kept many away—that and the fear of being found out and rejected by their families.

The worst cases that Ange Mpala sees are the women and girls with fistulas. The result of rape so violent that the wall between the anus or the bladder and the vagina is torn, a fistula allows urine
and feces to leak into the vagina; such extensive damage to her body also creates a terrible odour that ostracizes the woman from others. Mpala sends those patients to Goma for surgery.

“Together we need to denounce this,” she said. “Even if a woman doesn’t know who raped her, all the women need to stand up and say, ‘In this place there was a rape.’ They need to break the silence.” Posters declaring “Silence Is Violence” paper the walls of the MSF clinics in Congo. Mpala is one of hundreds of women who have recently called for change: demanding that the UN fulfil its duty to protect by sending in more troops, calling on women everywhere to support the courageous people here seeking change and attempting to persuade Congolese women that stopping violence is a fight they can win.

Such atrocities tend to paralyze the change-makers. No sooner has a law been enacted that makes rape a war crime, and the UN Security Council has finally acknowledged that rape is being used as a strategy of war, than it’s necessary to immediately confront the fact that some depraved humans will bring misogyny to dreadful new levels, no matter the worldwide condemnation they face.

~

A cautionary tale was told at the Nobel women’s conference about the speed at which the gains women make can be lost. In 1996, a peace agreement brought Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war to a close. The conflict had caused thousands of civilian deaths, over 90,000 unsolved disappearances and more than 100,000 cases of sexual violence. After the peace accord was signed, women had become more aware of their rights and some
political space had opened for them, says Luz Méndez, the vice-president of the executive board of the National Union of Guatemalan Women. “Inside the women’s movement, we say the peace accords were a marking line. We had more opportunity to speak out, get organized to fight for our rights.” But after the war was over, organized crime and narco-traffickers soon moved in. She says, “Now the bandits attack women just because they are women.”

The violence that the drug traffickers imported with them altered the landscape outside the home, and the old violence against wives and daughters inside the home resurfaced as well. “Women dare not walk on the street today,” Méndez says, “but, worse, the assaults against women have spread like a virus to their own homes.” Although the violence at home is affecting all classes of society, the narco-violence is targeting mainly the lower economic classes on the street—the very women who have to venture outside to get to work. Méndez describes an all-too-common occurrence: a bus is hijacked and driven to a dark place, where all the women are taken out and raped. “Every day we hear one of our colleagues has had a problem concerning violence on the street or in the bus. Violence is impacting our lives very much. We changed the legislation; we have pretty good laws protecting our rights. We managed to create institutions. But this social problem of violence against women hinders our possibility to move and hinders our rights as citizens.”

Eighty percent of the drug-trafficking from south to north goes through Guatemala. Drug money has corrupted state institutions and imperilled the lives of 15 million people. Security and judicial institutions that have been historically weak are worse now that the drug barons have infiltrated them. Gang members
cruise around the towns and cities threatening government officials, attacking and terrifying women. But in Guatemala it’s not law enforcement or government institutions seeking ways to keep women safe and defeat the silence and secrecy that causes rape survivors to blame themselves, it’s the grassroots women’s organizations themselves. Women have learned to be patient, to wear governments down with never-ending petitions, to bowl naysayers over with ironclad data. Their tenacity has led to changes one might never have expected, like the announcement in Pakistan in January 2012 that the country’s senate had approved two bills that would better protect women and girls. The bills created harsher punishments for acid attacks on women (more than eighty-five hundred reported in one year alone, according to the Aurat Foundation, a local organization committed to women’s empowerment and citizen participation in governance) and criminalized the tribal law called
Bad
, the trading of young girls to settle tribal disputes. The bills also reversed the inheritance laws that prevented women from inheriting property. It was a good step forward for a country that the activist Farida Shaheed worries is at risk from fundamentalists. Shaheed knows that extremists are close to the government—sometimes part of it. Like women in Guatemala and elsewhere, women in Pakistan need to stay vigilant to protect their gains.