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Democratic Republic of the Congo
All these never-ending wars have stripped the people of all their social projects, destroyed many of the infrastructures and ruined the economy. The rebels and the militia carry off everything they find. They pillage the fields, the animals and even destroy germinating crops. Paradoxically, the daily reality of Congolese women is that, far from being liberated from oppression, they are being deprived of the very hope of life. In the DRC, anyone who escapes the sword or the bullet is likely to fall victim to starvation.
Sexual acts of terror
In times of political crisis, the men are quick to take up arms to show that they can do. The strongest kill and eliminate the weak or turn them into slaves. Apart from firearms, sex is used to demonstrate the phallic power that can crush and annihilate women and young girls.
In the DRC, grandmothers, mothers, daughters and even little girls as young as four, have been violated. Rape seems to be systematically practised as though it were part of the law of war, whereas in fact it is an abusive act and a war crime. This situation accompanies almost every war in the world, but the ordeal imposed on the women of Eastern DRC outdoes everything by the sheer intensity and depravity of it. It is beyond imagining. According to reports by humanitarian organisations working in the region, the war in DRC from August 1998 until 2003 produced 8,000 cases of rape in the province of South Kivu alone. The true figures are probably much higher because many women fear being ostracised and say nothing about the rape they have suffered.
In the region of south Kivu, in the Mwenga territory, some 150 km south of Bukavu, a worker said that rape had reached such proportions that they have started purifying women rather than repudiating them, using a rite normally used for women guilty of adultery. She explained that in this territory rape had been committed on such a scale that all the women and girls there had been raped. “At first men repudiated their wives, then when they realised that they would have to repudiate all the women without exception, they initiated purifying rites.”
The violence against the women intensified with the second war of aggression against DRC. It seemed as if the war encouraged the violence, which then became daily practice. Despite all the efforts for peace, this terror continues. This is how one observer has described the depravity:
“Since the beginning of this year, sexual violence is ritually exercised so often that it is almost standard practice. Several men rape one woman and do so several times. Her husband is bound hand and foot in their cabin and the children are brought in too. All of them are forced to be present… The attackers force the family to engage in acts of incest between father and daughter or brother and sister. They even go so far as to sodomise some of the men, an act that is quite unthinkable in rural Africa, even in consenting relations.”
Sexuality remains a taboo in Africa: sex can never be practised in public, far less in front of one’s own children. Customs are being overturned. These children are left inwardly shocked and injured. It teaches them to lose respect for everything to do with their culture or even to develop a deep-rooted hatred for all those guilty of raping their mothers.
The men who commit these atrocities have no idea of the physical and psychological costs of their loathsome actions. The worst thing is that some of the men who commit these crimes have even gone on to execute some of their victims, on the pretext of saving them from shame and suffering.
Sometimes the women who have been raped are condemned to live in isolation. African humanity is under scrutiny as a result of this violence. It has been betrayed by inhuman practices. The respect due to the one who gives birth to life has been trampled underfoot. The whole notion of decency has been lost, things that are taboo and prohibited are revealed for all to see.
The child victims of terror in Eastern DRC
The violence perpetrated against children comes on the one hand from the war itself and on the other from the consequences of the violence against women, their mothers. What is special about the Eastern DRC is that the children who are recruited into militias are the youngest ones who are still totally dependent on their parents. They are known locally as “Kadogo”. They are forcibly snatched from their parents or from school and taken into the forest to receive military training. The ones who cannot keep up with the training die without their parents knowing anything about it. It has happened that in the fighting, children from the same family recruited by different groups have found themselves face to face. So, although the war has been officially ended by the Pretoria agreements, and some children who survived have been demobilised and returned to their families, they have become dangerous – not just among themselves but for their families and for society as a whole because of their disastrous education in violence.
In the second case, the children are victims of the violence to which their mothers are subjected. Even in his mother’s womb, a child can communicate and follow her movements, moods and feelings. But while they were carrying their children, these women were victims of every kind of violence. They were intimidated, terrorised, frightened by gunfire and the nightmare of rape and death was ever present. Such acts of terror spare no one, not even babies in their mother’s womb, and all the children born during this crisis are affected by it.
Peace will not be restarted where everything has been laid waste by violence simply by rebuilding the social and political structures; above all, we will have to eradicate the violence that resides in people’s hearts. This has less to do with politics and economics than with the mission of the Church and of the family, as the nucleus of the nation and all the other areas of education. To be effective, this mission will have to accompany both aggressors and victims, condemning acts of violence and trying to bring the two groups to make peace and act justly. This mission will also have to include therapy to help in healing all the women and children left traumatised by violence and thus break the vicious circle.
While recognising all the work done so far by non-governmental organisations,
the Church itself has a not-inconsiderable contribution to make to this
great mission for peace. It is well placed to speed awareness of peace
and ways of practising peace because it is still the place that assembles
large numbers of people in Africa. What is needed in this struggle against
terror and violence is a fundamental shift of consciousness. Konrad Raiser,
former general secretary of the World Council of Churches writes:
“We must give up being spectators of violence or merely lamenting
it and become active in overcoming violence within and outside the walls
of the Church. We remind ourselves and the churches of our common responsibility
to speak out boldly against any defence of unjust and oppressive structures,
the use of violence and gross violators of human rights committed in the
name of any nation or ethnic group.”
It would be a great and significant undertaking if all theological institutions and the local churches active in the religious field were to form a network in order to carry out their common mission of educating the people for peace and reconciliation, drawing on their relations at regional and continental level. We must invest in educating women and children who are the future of the whole region.
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