Congo where the rape is a weapon

• Republic of the Congo (ROC), also known as Congo-Brazzaville (and locally as Brazza), is the smaller of the two countries and lies to the west. It was called the People’s Republic of Congo from 1970 to 1992.
• Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), on the east, is today commonly abbreviated as DRC or DR Congo and sometimes is called “Congo-Kinshasa”. It was known as DRC from 1964-1971, then as Zaire from 1971-1997, and thereafter returned to the DRC name.

Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who’d disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts.

Here is an extract of the interview of Christine Schuler Deschryver a Congolese human rights activist by Amy Goodman.

CHRISTINE SCHULER DESCHRYVER: In Congo, since ten years ago, the war started in ’96. After the genocide in Rwanda in ’94, all the one who made the genocide arrived in Congo and stayed there in camps. And in ’96, when the war started, they went out from the camps and went inside the forest, and then they started killing and raping the Congolese population. Three years ago, we had the report from International Rescue Committee that already four million people died in Congo, so it’s one of the most .

There’s another form of very violent war with sexual terrorism going on in Congo. We are talking about more than — in all eastern part of Congo, more than 200,000 women, children and babies being raped every day, and now, right now, I am talking to you, thousands of women are taken and children into forests as slave sex.

As sex slaves, yeah. And we are not — I’m sorry just to talk like this — we are not talking about normal rapes anymore. We are talking about sexual terrorism, because they destroyed, and they — you cannot imagine what’s going on in Congo. Rape is a taboo, I think, in most of African countries, so the women who accept to go to the hospital or to be registered, it’s because they don’t have a choice anymore. They have to go and be repaired, because we are talking about new surgery to repair the women, because they’re completely destroyed. And the ones who are just raped without big destruction, they don’t talk about rape, because the African — the Congolese woman, she suffered so much that she can support being raped without telling it, when she doesn’t need medical care…

More about it? Just click here : The wole interview

To act? Just click here : V-day website

The women who had survived only have two choices :

==> Suffer in silence and act like nothing had happened.

==> Broke the silence and being helped:

Vumi suffers from incontinence, and cannot sit down because of the pain, the result of a horrific rape incident last October.

“The attack happened at night, and we were forced to flee into the bush. Four men took me. They all raped me. At that time I was nine months pregnant. They gang-raped me and pushed sticks up my vagina – that’s when my baby died – they said it was better than killing me.” The men then stole her few belongings and her community, unable to live with the smell, shunned her.

But it’s risky. Indeed, in Congo the rape is taboo. Talking about this is taken the risk of being fired of the village, being considered as soiled. Women had to be strong because after this dramatic incident they had to wrestle with the Community rejection.

~ par dasweetlady le février 10, 2008.