Hope on the horizon

She’s only 10 years old. Her enormous round eyes, the colour of chocolate brownies, are soul piercing when she talks about the men who raped her and left her for dead in the forest last June, after they attacked her village in eastern Congo. As she sits in the dark on the dirt floor of the make-shift hut her mother built in the bush, Siffy’s* story spills out in fragments. “The monsters are outside,” she says. “They want to kill us. They hurt me. I want to go home. But we can’t go there now.” A shaft of afternoon sun at the doorway splits the darkness and falls on her mother, Pascasie, who says, “I searched frantically for two days, but I couldn’t find her. It was a hunter who said he’d seen the body and would lead me to it.” Siffy was lying on her back, as still as the air, her arms spread and covered with mosquito bites. “I presumed she was dead but then — an almost imperceptible breath. There wasn’t even time to give thanks,” Pascasie says. “Soldiers were still prowling the thicket. I hoisted Siffy onto my back and got her out of there as fast as I could.” The assault has left Siffy bruised and traumatized. Like tens of thousands of girls and women who have survived the brutal rapes taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), she lived to be an eyewitness to the worst atrocity happening in a country that is convulsing with lawlessness. Yet, by all accounts, it’s the women themselves who are poised to yank this pitiless place out of its almost 15-year-old date with the devil. Since 1996, when the war began in the DRC, more than five million people — almost all of them civilians — have died. The International Rescue Committee, in a major 2007 mortality study, estimated that 45,000 more were dying every month. The health system has collapsed. The economy is devastated. The government of President Joseph Kabila has done little to counter a history of corruption and insecurity, as it staggers from one crisis to another. And, most horrifyingly, women are being raped in acts of violence so vicious they are almost unspeakable: Victims — from young children to elderly women — are paraded naked in town squares, assaulted vaginally with broken beer bottles, mutilated with machetes and gang-raped repeatedly. Those on the ground monitoring the situation say it is a sign of civilization coming apart at the seams. Canadian activist Stephen Lewis, co-director of the organization AIDS-Free World, describes it as “an unrelenting pattern of attacks on women, precisely because they are women, so extreme as to destroy their physical anatomies while subjecting them — and their family members who are forced to watch — to scenes of rape and mutilation worthy of Caligula in his worst moments of insanity.” The women of Congo have recruited some powerful allies: United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited last August and said, “In the face of such evil, people of goodwill everywhere must respond.” With that she pledged $17 million to train a police force in eastern Congo to protect the women and provide doctors to help them. The money was also designated to train police and legal staff to use mobile phones and cameras to document the violence. Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has spoken out, writing, “We cannot let rape be used as a weapon and as a strategy of war.” And playwright and feminist activist Eve Ensler of The Vagina Monologues fame has teamed up with UNICEF to build City of Joy, a transitional housing complex for rape survivors, that opens this month in the city of Bukavu, where they can recover and train as community leaders. Indeed, there are signs all over the DRC that the women are instigating change: “Silence Is Violence” posters are new additions to community centres in the regions of North and South Kivu, and groups such as Heal Africa, dedicated to the empowerment of women, have started public-education campaigns about the rights of women. The violence inflicted upon the women of Congo has also had an impact on the nation’s economy. For example, food production in Congo has fallen sharply, in part because so many women have been displaced, but also because those who are the planters are so wounded from sexual assault and terrified of the attackers who prowl the bush that they no longer go to the fields. The World Food Programme now estimates that 74 percent of the population is undernourished, and it has to supply food from an already strained international budget. What’s more, the consequences of sexual depravity affect everyone: When the caregivers are down, the paralyzing effects of war intensify. This is a place where girls as young as Siffy already know the difference between gang rape (one woman is raped by many men), mass rape (all the women in the village are raped) and re-rape (a word coined by the locals to describe repeated assaults on the same woman over time). Siffy shuffles a little closer to her mother and says, “The monsters tortured my mother, they took our food. I’m afraid of the monsters.” Suddenly, she wants her crayons and switches the subject to drawing. It seems she can recount only small pieces of her ordeal at a time. Her dazzling little-girl smile washes away the pain that clouded her face. Grinning, she pulls me into the other side of her world, the one with games and stories and sugar-cane treats. New heart of darkness The DRC is a country with lush mountainous terrain and topsoil so fertile you can kick a seed into the ground and have a plant by the week’s end. The rush of growth is the botanical equivalent of insanity: banana fronds big enough to shelter a grown man, vegetation so thick it creates its own perfume. Floral excesses of orchids, lobelias and lilies splash the landscape in saucy orange, crimson and delicate pink. It’s so mineral rich, the hillsides sparkle as though studded with broken glass. Thatched-roof 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 run through the villages. The countryside is so enchanting, it looks as if it could have been art directed. But there’s a disturbing reality here. The first skirmishes between the government and rebels began in 1996; a full- scale war started in 1998. Peace agreements were signed in 2002 and 2008, but the carnage, particularly against women, continues apace. The North and South Kivu provinces in the eastern DRC that border Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi have extremely rich mineral deposits, and militias and rebel groups — armed to the teeth — are vying to control them. It’s these men who are attacking the women and girls. Everyone who visits comes away with the same conclusion that Major General Patrick Cammaert, former commander of the peacekeeping forces in the eastern DRC, drew: “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict.” Failure to act Françoise Duroch from the University of Geneva in Switzerland is a gender-based-violence researcher for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the non-governmental organization best known for its quick response to disasters. She says, “The violence women are experiencing is often seen as a side effect of the war, rather than a sign that this can happen with impunity. Rape has been relegated as retribution, as an initiation ritual, as torture, as a morale booster for troops, as a means to humiliate and terrorize the population, as a strategy for ethnic cleansing, as a weapon of biological war for the spreading of HIV.” Then she adds, “There’s no sign it will stop any time soon.” And yet the world is mostly silent. Indeed, mention five million dead and hundreds of thousands raped and most will say they didn’t know. Not a single United Nations effort has alleviated the suffering; not the woefully inadequate 19,000 peacekeeping troops who have themselves been accused of offering food for sex. Not Resolution 1325, that was adopted in 2000 and calls for the increased involvement of women in all UN peace and security efforts. Not Responsibility to Protect, the UN security and human-rights document that was established precisely to prevent the very crimes against humanity occurring in the DRC today. “When there’s a licence to rape, these men go berserk,” Lewis says. “The willingness of the international community to tolerate it is the other implacable piece. I hope women in Canada will write to the United Nations, including our own ambassador, and accuse them of complicity.” On June 19, 2008, the UN Security Council did take the unprecedented step of declaring rape a strategy of war and, therefore, an issue of international security. Resolution 1820 states that sexual violence is used “as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.” It was Condoleezza Rice, then U.S. secretary of state, who presided over the special session of the Security Council and said, “We affirm that sexual violence profoundly affects not only the health and safety of women, but the economic and social stability of their nations.” Last September, the UN took another slow step forward: Resolution 1888, which lamented the lack of progress in stopping the rapes and called for the appointment of a Special Representative on Sexual Violence and Conflict. Former European Commission vice-president Margot Wallström was put in the post in February; her first scheduled trip was to the DRC this spring. Indeed, wherever the status of women is low, the malfeasance used against them is dismissed as collateral damage rather than fully fledged crimes. Yet the World Bank has emphasized that economic empowerment of women is a key strategy in moving the developing world forward. Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, former director of the UN Millennium Project, said there is a direct relationship between the status of women and the economy. In a 2008 speech, Sachs told the audience, “All societies where women are facing severe discrimination are also economic failures.” The women know that their ticket out of this abyss is empowerment, but first they need to heal. And even while groups like MSF operate in the DRC at their peril, the need is colossal. Body as battlefield In early December 2009, there was a sudden increase in rape in a place called Nyanzale, a four-hour drive west of the woods where Siffy and her mother found shelter in the outskirts of Kitchanga. At the MSF clinic at the top of the hill overlooking the village, Ange Mpala, a psychologist who grew up here but now lives part-time in the provincial capital of Goma, is trying to work miracles with survivors. “There’s physical pain in the back and the stomach when you’ve been raped,” she says. “The victims feel dirty and wounded deep inside. They all need treatment within 72 hours to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” But shame keeps many away, that and the fear of being found out and rejected by the family. The worst cases Mpala sees are fistulas, tears in the wall between the vagina and the anus or the bladder, caused by particularly violent assaults, that allow urine and feces to leak out. Women with fistulas are ostracized because of the smell and the stigma of having been raped; Mpala sends those patients to hospitals in Goma for surgery. The psychiatric therapy offered by MSF is as valuable as the surgery. In her office in Goma, Banu Altunbas, the head of mission for MSF in the DRC, speaks of the extraordinary need for counselling. “Women began coming forward and we realized that many who had been raped were isolated,” she says. “They needed to talk about it. We brought in therapists who knew how to help them process what had happened to them. Without help, they can’t heal. And they won’t get the help at home. Even an educated man, a lawyer here in Goma, told me, ‘We cannot accept a raped woman. She is spoiled. We don’t want her.’ ” Ana Cristina Henriques, a Brazilian-Portuguese MSF mental-health officer working in North and South Kivu, says almost every woman she sees has been raped at least once. “They are frightened and usually abandoned by their husbands, because they’re seen as damaged goods.” Henriques’s miniscule office in Kitchanga looks like a camp tuck shop. It was here she met Siffy last June. “She was severely traumatized,” Henriques says. “The only piece of her own identity she could recall was her age — the number 10. 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: icumi, the Kinyarwandan word for 10. After three and a half weeks of 60-minute sessions per day, she finally said her name.” The attack on Siffy was much like every other story — the militias arrive, tell the men and boys to leave and shoot those who don’t. Then, they set fire to the village, rape the women and girls, steal the livestock and move on. Only in this case, Pascasie had warning that they were coming. She ran to the hut she keeps in the forest to hide with Siffy and the three-year-old grandson she’s also raising because his father, her eldest son, was killed by the roving soldiers during an earlier attack. But the militia discovered their hideout. They told Pascasie that they knew she had a pig at home and instructed her to go with two of the soldiers to get it. Once there, the soldiers whacked her 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 she went back to the woods to get Siffy, the girl was gone. Pascasie, who’s been sitting with Siffy listening to Henriques tell their gruesome tale through a translator, picks up the story from here. “It was after I found my daughter 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 flashbacks and panic attacks whenever she saw men. I brought her here to Kitchanga for treatment.” Road to recovery Henriques is a soft-spoken, enormously sympathetic woman who uses every technique she knows to bring Siffy out of the haze of trauma. In one session, she gives her a doll. Siffy keeps washing it over and over again, telling the therapist the doll is dirty, that the monsters had hurt the doll. She drools almost continuously — probably due to brain damage sustained when the men beat her, but when her mother reminds her, “Hold your saliva,” she does for a while. Her right arm appears afflicted, tucked into her side like a bird’s broken wing, but when you play high-five with her, she inadvertently pokes her right hand forward, not far, and the delighted look on her face makes you think that she may get her life back after all. “The women here have not only been raped and sometimes re-raped, they’ve witnessed their sons being killed, their husbands mutilated, their own bodies slashed with machetes,” says Henriques. One woman who came to her clinic was forced to watch while her husband and seven children were shot by the militia. Afterwards, 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 herded together with her village while militiamen set fire to their thatched-roof huts. Then the soldiers opened fire. The woman survived simply because she was at the back of the pack. She lay on the ground with the blood of her children and her extended family running over her until the soldiers swaggered out of the village. The next day Henriques’s appointed rounds include a meeting with 20 women, aged 22 to 75, who’ve been raped and chased away from their burning homes. They presently live in a displacement camp nearby. It’s one of those low-cloud days when the warm Congo air softly brushes your skin, releasing the ethereal fragrances of the flowers that dot the field where we gather. Each of the women has a horrific story to tell, but this morning they want to talk about their dreams of escape and their plans for change. Saverina describes a typical Congolese woman: “She does all the heavy lifting. She plants the crops, 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, she adds, people say, “we’re not equal to the men because we don’t wear the pants.” The riot of colour in the circle — the yellows and blues, the reds and mint greens of their dress — belies the submission they’ve been subjected to all their lives. One after the other they say, “We’re seen as worthless.” When asked about their sons and husbands, one woman says, “A young boy has to respect his mother but once he marries, he follows his father as a role model. We want to change that. But we don’t know how.” With Henriques urging them on, they begin to verbalize a topic that has essentially been taboo. “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 asked, the men offer a mélange of excuses: “Our commanders expect this of us; if we don’t rape the women the other men will think we aren’t real men.” But today, the women are ready to talk. And if they can talk, they can then begin to make change. As the session draws to a close, one woman begins to sing. Her powerful contralto voice soars into the tree tops. Another woman joins her, then another. The Kinyarwandan words mean “Thank you for bringing us together.” Soon the entire circle is singing a hootenanny-like song punched up with a powerful beat that stirs the soul and reverberates against the ribs. On the far side of the circle, a woman stands up to dance. She boogies in time to the music, then pulls me to my feet to join the jig. We are a group of women dancing, singing and rejoicing in each other’s company. For a moment, the stories of brutality are laid to rest. *Name has been changed.