Kimya II: A Newer, More Quiet Raping in the Congo
In 1996, I was sitting with twenty thousand grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their protection to UN peacekeepers who stood passively as ten thousand of their men were marched off to be slaughtered. I will never forget the wailing of the women in that stadium as they cried out, demanding the international community explain how they could have allowed this horror to take place.
It is now thirteen years later and I am in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, where, this time, UN peacekeepers (MONUC) are not passively standing by and watching the massacres, but are actually supporting the perpetrators.
For nearly 12 years an invisible war has ravaged this beloved, beleaguered country. Over five million dead, hundreds of thousands of women and girls raped and sexually tortured in the most unimaginable ways, 800 internally displaced since January 2009 and close to 350,000 forced to flee to neighboring countries. This violence is fueled by the world's need for minerals most recently due to the economic crisis it is Gold. Congo, the sixth most mineral rich country in Africa, has become the stage for a regional war fueled by economic interests.
In January, military operations were launched in North Kivu. The so-called goal of this military plan was to arrest the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and neutralize his troops, the CNDP, the former Rwandan Hutu militia, the FDLR, as well as other armed militias. Even though public spin on this operation touted its success (UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon famously celebrated it in a February speech in Goma), the statistics bare another horrific story. Since the operation began, a thousand women and children have been raped each month in North Kivu, massacres have ravaged villages, displacing entire communities, and new, even more horrific tortures of women have surfaced (including the lighting of fuel in women's vaginas). There has been no accountability for these horrific crimes, no justice, hardly a mention in the world press. Hospitals like Heal Africa in Goma are overflowing with the raped children and women.
Now on the heels of catastrophe, rather than learning something, the UN has joined with the FARDC (the Congolese army) to create an even more disastrous plan: Kimya II. This operation reads like a chapter from some psychotic science fiction novel. The plan is to bring together former enemy militias -- FARDC, PARECO (Mai Mai), and CNDP -- without reason, without training, without investigation into former war crimes, without stepping back and considering what steps must be taken to integrate former enemy militias into one unified body. In essence, the war criminals who were responsible for raping, destroying and terrorizing Bukavu in 2004 are now being charged with protecting it -- not unlike, say, hiring the Nazis to protect Warsaw after World War II.
The most terrifying aspect of this most recent operation is that MONUC is officially facilitating it by offering logistical support. What this means is that the international community is supporting this operation. A high-ranking MONUC official told me off the record that when the Security Council was in Goma a month ago he asked them "Are you saying you support Kimya II? Does this mean you are supporting war criminals and rapists as commanders of this operation?" When one of the members of the council balked, he produced a black list of war criminals with their charges and evidence of their crimes. Security Council members gave the list to President Kabila, but none of the commanders were removed and the operation moved forward.
As this rag-tag group of starving soldiers spread out into the forests and villages of South Kivu in preparation for Operation Kimya II the massacres have already begun. The FDLR as usual is revenge-raping women in the forests, villages are being set on fire. At least 463 cases of reported rape in the last 3 months, more than half the number in 2008. A three-year-old girl was raped so brutally recently that she died on her way to the Panzi Hospital. All of her sisters, aged 12, 14 and 17, have also been raped. Imagine what it will be like when Operation Kimya II actually begins in South Kivu? When these hungry soldiers, thrown together from various militias, and led by war criminals and rapists are unleashed on the civilian population in the forests, where no one is watching, and where there is no means of protection. The mind boggles.
No one I have spoken to anywhere in the Congo believes this operation will be anything but catastrophic, and this includes foot soldiers in MONUC who are meant to implement the operation, on up to high-ranking officials in the organization. Yet not a single world leader or Congolese leader or international government, or member of the Security Council is stopping it or offering a viable alternative that protects the civilian population rather than destroying it. As five Episcopal Bishops from Bukavu recently wrote in a joint statement: "Elected Deputies and Senators seem like they don't care. They can't agree on anything and so they endlessly discuss rather than taking action. The dysfunctional judiciary encourages criminality and "popular" justice. All this is done in front of parliamentarians who do nothing. We have one important question. Do the authorities take time to evaluate the operation before starting it? The Kimya II operation seems like it will give birth to a much more devastating and all encompassing war. "
Despite these cries, the war continues because the Western world is hungry for Congo's minerals. They push for a military "solution," knowing well that they are doomed in the Congo. Despite a powerful, emerging women's movement, despite the work of brave doctors giving their lives to perform day-long operations on the raped bodies of women, despite local activists and survivors of rape working with their hearts to change the situation and wake up the world to a war that has destroyed their country, the Congo still doesn't register in our consciousness.
It turns out that Kimya means "sssh," quiet, invisible in Swahili. Ironic.
Will we as humanity raise our voices before it's too late and prevent the next round of massacres in the Congo?
Eve Ensler is a writer and activist. She is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.
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The West has love affair with "save Darfur" somehow, that seems more important than over 5million death in the Congo so far. I wonder why? Perhaps those conscious of this should create non superficial "Save Congo". Why isn't Mia Furrow and the likes are not standing for the Congo? I wander somehow there is certain interest in Sudan than Congo. We have to wait until the Western corporations have enough wealth looting from the Congo and the Western governments will then start indictment against the leaders of the Congo but the culprits of Western corporations as usual go for free.
Thank you Eve, for letting us know and telling the world. To think that the UN somehow will say something.. on the contrary.
Conflicts where the result is hunger (Darfur) are seen as somewhat easier to solve than conflicts whose result is atrocities. You can feed people without staining your hands with blood. To stop a violent conflict often requires more violence. I think this is one of the reasons it's harder to direct attention to the Congo than Sudan. Calling for violence to stop violence is more controversial than calling for feeding people.
That may be at work her. So is probabbly the fact some people/some countries/some world leaders are so focused on accessing the natural resources of Congo (the minerals) that they choose to forget about the human resources of Congo (the people).
Aaaarrrrrgggggggghhhh! **&TTHHUT&% &*(&)(^^Y Y&**(^*&^lk. What can we do to help.
can you please tell us what we can do? it is incredibly difficult to read about all this suffering and have no options at the end of the essay.
The central cause of the conflict isn't foreign interference, it's the fact that the borders of African nations do not correspond to tribal boundaries. As such, enemy tribes often find themselves within the same country and naturally they fight for control of the government. Unfortunately women get caught in the middle of it as each side tries to ethnically exterminate or humiliate the other.
The international community have been as useless in DRC/Zaire as they have been in Darfur.
The first they have to do is get the hangers-on out of the war. Zimbabwe and Angola need to be dealt with to reduce the complexities of the conflict. Essentially it comes down once again to Tutsi's versus Hutu's.
Any permanent peace deal in that region must include redrawn borders and the creation of essentially two new countries "Tutsiland" and "Hutuland"
Are the only talking points you have discredited colonial nonsense from the late 60's and 70's? I honestly haven't heard garbage like that since the early 80's and then it was being put forward by someone whose understanding of the continent came from a brief perusal of headlines in the Daily Telegraph.
It's quite amusing to see stuff like this as it takes me back a couple of decades but at the same time it's quite disturbing that there are people out there who actually still believe it.
“Well the natives never could get along old boy, need to split them into their tribes and then let them go at each other with sticks on the border”.
People are people. People should behave like people towards other people. That goes regardless of the people in question being men, women, hutus, tutsis, neighbors or people living in different parts of the world.
What Eve Ensler is trying to draw attention to, is humans acting inhuman. She has done this for quite some while. Every time she writes something on the subject, I read it, and every time, it breaks my heart. Getting my heart broken gives me no excuse to look away. And I won't. But the only way this crisis, because it is a crisis, can be solved, is by people focusing on the problem, instead of focusing on talking points on how different people are and how people can't live together. People can live together, and people must live together.
Looking away is inhuman, as inhuman as the vicious acts the rapists of Congo make themselves guilty in. That goes for the peacekeepers, and that goes for the rest of the world, too.
As usual blaming the Africans for years of misery created by colonization borders and still denying Western interference alas..
Eve, you will always be my hero. I applaud you for this article. I am so grateful for the information in it. As a long time supporter of Women for Women International, with a 'sister' in the Congo, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the horrors going on there. I was wrong. I had no idea of how much worse it could get, and how quickly it could happen. What can we do?
Thank you for calling our attention to this monstrous situation.
If saddens me how much more we could do as a nation if only we weren't so distracted, divided and misled by our so-called "leaders".
More reason yet to work toward a world not dominated by rich white male imperatives. Leaders of the US should start paying attention to their electorate. It's becoming more obvious to us naves everyday just how utterly corrupt our system has become at the hands of greedy (generally) white males intent on having so much money that they can hire government, military, mercenary, and of course media outlets necessary to inflict their agenda on whomever they please.
Aren't we fed up with this yet? Iran may prove instructive for Americans sooner rather than later.
I too think that Iran may prove VERY instructive.
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