There are claims emerging from the Democratic Republic of Congo that the rebel M23 movement is raping and looting. M23 vehemently deny the claims, with an unidentified colonel stating: "We are Christian. We have a big fear of God. We pray. It doesn't make sense to kill and rape and loot. We are here for the cause."
Denials aside, the fact remains that rape has been used as a weapon of war in the Congo for many, many years, with women’s bodies becoming a battleground on which to exert terror, control and compliance.
Below is an excerpt from Anneke Van Woudenberg’s chapter in The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for Women's Rights, her chapter is titled ‘Confronting Rape as a Weapon of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo.’
During my twelve years of working in this war-torn country, my colleagues at Human Rights Watch and I have recorded thousands of stories of sexual violence and other brutal attacks on civilians. Scores of notebooks line the shelves of my office, their pages filled with one horrifying story after another. Sexual violence has reached extraordinary levels in Congo. There are no exact statistics since collecting data in a war zone is exceedingly difficult, but the UN estimates that at least two hundred thousand women and girls have been raped since 1998, though most UN officials say they believe the number is much higher. In April 2010, the UN 130 Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict labeled Congo “the rape capital of the world.”
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in May 2011 found that four hundred thousand women and girls ages fifteen to forty-nine were raped in a twelve-month period in 2006 and 2007. Its authors state that their findings only “represent a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of sexual violence” since it excludes younger and older victims, and many women are reluctant to report rape. If we suppose the number of rapes were the same for the previous and subsequent years (and it is possible they are much higher since levels of conflict were more intense in other years), the total number of women raped in Congo could be well over 2 million. Conflict has been the single most important contributor to Congo’s rape epidemic. While sexual violence certainly existed before the outbreak of war, two consecutive wars—the first from 1996 to 1997 followed by a second war from 1998 to 2003—significantly altered the scale of sexual violence in Congo. Since the official end of Congo’s second war, conflict has continued in eastern parts of the country. The wars and the continued fighting drew in armies from neighboring countries and spawned dozens of Congolese armed groups. Nearly all fighting factions claimed they were defending local populations or working to install democracy and the rule of law. But in reality soldiers and combatants exploited Congo’s immense mineral wealth and preyed on civilians. An estimated 5 million people have died since 1998, the vast majority due to the lack of food or access to medical services, making Congo’s war the deadliest in the world since World War II.
Anneke Van Woudenberg is the senior researcher for the Democratic Republic of Congo in Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division.
