The women asked me what they had done to deserve such suffering - Mail on Sunday - You Magazine 15/02/09

Inside the villages where every woman is victim of hidden war
Chris McGreal explains how rape became a ‘weapon of war’ in Congo

Chris McGreal
The Guardian, Friday December 5 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/05/congo-women

They came out of the forest. Men with guns appearing barely human to the frail, ageing woman who months later recounted her ordeal, bent double after surgery to save her womb.

“They didn’t look like men. Their skin was covered in cuts. Their clothes were completely torn. They became someone else, not humans,” she said at a hospital in the often fought-over town of Rutshuru in eastern Congo.

But the woman still recognised the men who descended on her village as members of the Mai Mai ethnic militia. Their preference for wearing animal skins and amulets, popular for their supposed magical powers of protection, distinguished them from the government soldiers, foreign rebels and other armed gangs who have also contributed to the wholesale rape of hundreds of thousands of women and girls over more than a decade of conflict.

It took months for the 58-year-old woman from Kindu to reach Rutshuru hospital for treatment and to tell her story. The Mai Mai shot her husband when he didn’t have any money to hand over. When her children screamed they shot them too. Then the woman was raped by five men. One of her attackers nearly destroyed her womb by thrusting his gun into it. She fled her village. As she travelled to Rutshuru she was raped again, this time by Rwandan Hutu extremists who fled to Congo after leading the genocide in their own country.

“It is impossible to live in safety. They have murdered my children, they have murdered my husband. They have raped me so many times. I do not know who is alive and who is dead in my village,” she said.

Hers is not an unusual account from survivors of villages in eastern Congo subjected to repeated attacks in which women and girls were serially raped and the men killed. Health clinics in the region treat tens of thousands of women for sexual assault every year, and doctors say that is a fraction of those who were attacked. Last year, Médecins Sans Frontières estimated that 75% of all the rape cases it dealt with worldwide were in eastern Congo. Many young women have been abducted into sexual slavery. In some villages, armed groups kill the men and rape all the women. Many are left HIV positive and pregnant. In some larger towns, such as Shabunda, Congolese human rights groups estimate seven out of 10 women have been raped.

Mutilation

Doctors say the onslaught against women is notable not only for its scale but for its brutality. Gang rapes are commonplace and frequently accompanied by torture in which women are mutilated by having guns or stakes thrust into their vaginas, or their genitals slashed with knives. One in four who make it to hospitals in Goma and Rutshuru require major surgery. More than a third are teenagers.

Human rights groups say that while rape is a product of many conflicts, its systematic nature in Congo makes it a “weapon of war” used to terrorise and punish communities or as a tool of ethnic cleansing.

Immaculee Birhaheka, the head of Paif, a women’s rights group in Goma, said almost no woman outside of a few major towns is safe. She describes what happened in a string of villages along the rudimentary road south from Goma toward Bukavu, 75 miles away. “The women who come from there tell us that every woman in every village has been raped over the years. There is not one who was not attacked, they told us. Some of them were captured and taken into the forest for months, even two years. When they are released some are in such bad condition that they die.

“The women don’t talk about it as a weapon of war but they say they are seriously targeted, that it is very organised. It’s clear from the behaviour of the soldiers that they have permission to attack women. Their commanders do not stop it and may even order it.”

One of those commanders is Colonel Edmond Ngarambe who serves in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an armed group of Hutu exiles born out of the Interahamwe militia that led the genocide in Rwanda. The FDLR controls about 40% of the territory in the two Congolese provinces worst hit by conflict, North and South Kivu.

Last year, in a village south of Bukavu, he admitted his men were responsible for systematic sexual assaults on women. “This thing of rape, I can’t deny that happens. We are human beings. But it’s not just us. The Mai Mai, the government soldiers who are not paid, the Rastas do the same thing. And some people sent by our enemies do it to cause anger against us,” he said.

That many other groups - from the Mai Mai to Tutsi rebels and the Rastas, a group of defectors from the likes of the FDLR - are also responsible for mass rape is not in doubt. But around Bukavu the victims tend to point the fingers at Ngarambe’s men.

It may be no coincidence that rape was an integral part of the mass killings in Rwanda 14 years ago. The international tribunal trying those responsible for organising the genocide made a landmark ruling that for the first time defined rape as an act of genocide under international law if it is part of a systematic move to wipe out an ethnic group.

But others too are responsible. Forces under the command of the rebel Congolese Tutsi general, Laurent Nkunda, who recently seized swaths of territory in North Kivu, have a long history of assaults on women. Three years ago they attacked Bukavu. A Human Rights Watch report said Nkunda’s forces “went house to house raping and looting”. Among the victims were teenagers and three girls of three years old.

Retribution

MSF says that “while rape is etched into the general framework of violence”, it’s also seen as legitimate “additional retribution” by the armed groups against civilians who fail to hand over food or are perceived as supporting their enemies.

Many women have to make the appalling choice between risking rape by venturing out of their villages to tend their crops in order to feed their children, and seeking a modicum of protection in numbers but risking starvation. Among them is a 23-year-old woman from Walikali. She is small, thin-faced and her eyes dart about constantly.

“There were four of us. I was looking for food. There were seven Interahamwe and they took us. Two of us tried to run away. They shot at them. One was shot through the chest and died. The other got a bullet in the leg. They raped her,” she said. “I fainted because there were seven of them and it was too hard for me. When they left it was raining. Our families came looking. We were all bleeding. We were almost dead.”

Horror revisited for genocide survivor

Esther Addley
The Guardian, Friday December 5 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/05/rwanda-congo-genocide-rape

Leah Chishugi describes herself as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Now 34, she grew up in eastern Congo but by 16 she had moved to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to find work as a model, later marrying and having a son. In 1994 she was caught up in the conflict and wounded, and her father was killed. She escaped only after being left for dead under a pile of corpses, fleeing to Uganda, and later South Africa and the UK, where she was granted asylum.

It was this summer, after the death of her mother, whom Chishugi, 34, describes as “the biggest supporter of the women in the east part of Congo”, that she decided to return to record women’s experiences in the lawless region. “It is not normal for women to suffer so much,” she says. “We have to refuse to allow this suffering to continue.” She says she is the first person from “the outside world” to reach the villages, thanks to her ability to blend in with locals - she speaks 15 African languages.

Visits to Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, and a meeting with the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, have convinced her that neither government is concerned about the women’s situations.

“I am not a politician but I want to let the world know what is going on. I believe that Kagame, [Joseph] Kabila [the Congolese president] and [Laurent] Nkunda [the Tutsi rebel leader] all know exactly what is going on.”

After arriving in Britain in 1997, Chishugi trained as a nurse and until recently worked at the Royal Free hospital in London, where she lives with her “lovely son”. She is now in the process of setting up a charity called Everything is a Benefit to distribute food and medical aid to the women of eastern Congo.

“I am grateful to have my life, grateful to have a roof over my head and grateful to live in Europe. I want to fundraise to help these women and take back medical supplies. I am a survivor of genocide and this trip has changed me. It made me see that because I had to chance to survive now I have a chance to change things for other people who are suffering.”

Aged one to 90, the victims of hidden war against women

Diane Taylor
The Guardian, Friday December 5 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/05/congo-rape-testimonies-walungu

Mirindi Euprazi was at home with her family when the rebels attacked. They broke into her home and took all her possessions, before torturing her, her husband and their teenage children. Then the horror began.

“They forced my son to have sex with me, and when he’d finished they killed him. Then they raped me in front of my husband and then they killed him too. Then they took away my three daughters.” She hasn’t heard of the three girls, 13, 14 and 17, since. A small woman, she speaks softly and without visible emotion, but as she describes being left naked while her house burned, she raises a hand to cover her face.

Euprazi, 50, lives in the village of Ninja, in the Walungu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, close to Rwanda’s western border. Today, Ninja is a village almost exclusively of women and children. Most of the husbands have been killed, either by Interahamwe - the Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide who then fled over the border into the forests of eastern Congo - or by Tutsi rebels led by General Laurent Nkunda. Almost every woman here has been raped, some countless times. Some have been so badly injured by repeated rapes by different militias that they are barely able to stand. Many of their children were conceived through rape.

The plight of the women of Walungu has been documented in remarkable video footage obtained by a nurse and featured in a Guardian film.

Walungu is just 40 miles from Bukavu, one of a handful of regional centres where the UN, international aid agencies and journalists have been based since fighting between Nkunda’s militia and Congolese troops displaced 250,000 people in eastern Congo. Their purpose is to protect civilians and distribute aid, but the NGOs say it is often too dangerous to venture outside the towns. In Ninja, women and children go hungry. Humanitarian aid has not reached here, and there is no security.

Leah Chishugi, a nurse now living in London, travelled to the region in September and October to take food and medicine to the villages. Chishugi grew up in Goma, just inside the Congolese border, so she knows the region well and is fluent in local languages, but after narrowly surviving the Rwandan genocide in 1994 she fled as a refugee to Britain. Appalled by what she discovered on her return, she began to film interviews with rape survivors in the villages.

“The women told me I was the first person from the outside world to reach them. They have had no help from aid agencies, nor from the Congolese government and the UN, because this area is too dangerous for them to travel to.”

She rented a car in Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and drove to Walungu. When the roads became impassable she walked. “The forests were littered with corpses,” she said. “It was a horrific sight and the smell was unbearable. I imagine that many of the bodies were those of the men who had lived in the villages.

“This killing of the men has happened in other places too such as Kiwanja [further north]. I’m sure the idea is that by getting rid of the men they weaken the population, so that if they want to take full control of this territory … there are no local men to fight them.”

Over the two months she interviewed approximately 500 rape victims. She recorded names, ages, locations of the rapes and whether the perpetrators were Tutsi or Hutu. The youngest victim was a one-year-old baby, the oldest a woman of 90. Many were raped in their homes, others in the forests where they gathered firewood. One 14-year-old already had two children conceived through rape. These atrocities are not new: the oldest child Chishugi recorded who was conceived through rape by the militias was nine years old.

“I was on my way to market with some of the other women when I stopped off to pee,” one woman told Chishugi. “I was carrying wood and I was taken by the rebels. Five of them raped me. I still have pain in my legs because they were so violent. Afterwards they said, ‘You must not walk alone any more.’ I have two children born from the rebels.”

Nsimire Bachiyunjuze, 21, was 16 when she was first taken by the rebels. “I now have three children born through rape and I’m HIV positive as a result of what they did to me.” Her husband rejected her.

HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are rife among the women who have been raped, says Chishugi. “Some of the babies were born sick with HIV and the women told me they threw these babies in the bush. Some of the women are bleeding all the time and there are lots of vaginal infections.”

Madame, 70, said: “Since they raped me nowhere in my body feels right. I have problems with my womb, back and stomach. The rebels took my daughter and now I’m looking after my four grandchildren. I have to sleep in the church because I have no house.”

“I saw horrific injuries from the rapes,” said Chishugi. “Sometimes the rebels shove corn cobs or gun barrels into the women’s vaginas after they’ve raped them. I saw women who were permanently sat on basins because since they’d been raped they hadn’t stopped bleeding. I also saw women who’d had their breasts cut off.”

One charity worker said the problems had persisted since shortly after the genocide. “Hutus pursued by Tutsi militias had their camps dismantled and then invaded remote villages. Since then these outlaws, both Hutus and Tutsis, have been committing massacres. People sleep in the bush fearing night raids. Many die from pneumonia and malaria. We don’t yet know how many casualties there are [but] no humanitarian aid is reaching these people.”

A spokesman for the UNHCR said that while there were many agencies working in Walungu, they had “minimal presence” in villages close to areas still occupied by Hutu militias known as FDLR.

“There are frequent reports of sexual abuse of women and girls by both FDLR and Congolese army,” said the spokesman. “Areas such as Ninja … are more far flung and inaccessible due to the continued presence of FDLR in the forests. Agencies will not go to areas where their safety cannot be guaranteed.”

“This situation is not going to go away,” Chishugi said. “I want the international community to take action. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide nobody spoke up for us and now I want to speak up for people who are suffering.

“[These women] are still terrified when you talk to them; you really find the deeper pain in their heart. So they need more than just food. These people need help.”

On Wednesday, the court of appeal dismissed an attempt to argue that it was not safe to return failed asylum seekers to DRC, and forced removals to the country may resume shortly.

This article was amended on Friday December 5 2008. The Rwandan genocide took place in 1994, not 1984, as a typographical error originally said in the article above. This has been corrected.

This article was further amended on Saturday December 6 2008 to remove an error introduced during the editing process