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“I don’t want my story to become just a song that I sing over and over,” says Alfonsine, a tiny, soft-spoken 30-year-old who survived an unimaginable rape, and has just been invited to be a spokesperson at the launch of a national campaign against sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Her objection is entirely valid: although I am meeting her for the first time, I already know that a man abducted Alfonsine in the forest, raped her and fired a bullet into her vagina, destroying her insides. I know that despite several operations to reconstruct her bladder and colon, she will always need a colostomy bag, can never again have intercourse with her husband, will never bear children. I know that during her recovery, she somehow summoned the strength to earn her high school diploma and is now working with rape survivors, here at the Panzi Hospital where we’re meeting, and that she is studying to be a nurse. I also know from my research that the saintly man to my right, Dr. Denis Mukwege, Managing Director of this medical refuge in the Congo’s conflict-ravaged eastern region, has played tour guide and host to countless aid workers and journalists, donors, assessment teams and researchers over the past nine years, and that he has few resources to show for it.
“What good has it done to tell my story?” Alfonsine asks activist/playwright Eve Ensler, whom I’ve accompanied on her second trip to the Congo in six months. Well, in fact, Eve reports, it set off a whole chain of events: Alfonsine’s story was included in a magazine article that Eve published in the US and circulated worldwide; the article sparked new media interest, and Eve was twice invited to speak to the UN Security Council; V-Day – the global anti-violence movement that Eve started ten years ago – has teamed up with local women’s rights activists, UNICEF and the Panzi Hospital to end violence against Congolese women. In a few days’ time, the First Lady will launch a national campaign called “Stop raping our greatest resource: Power to women and girls of DRC”. That’s where Alfonsine’s help is needed; her ordeal was a dreadful one, but her triumph over it is an inspiration. The young woman nods. “That’s good,” she says.
And best of all, Eve tells her excitedly, we raised enough money to purchase a plot next to Panzi for a “City of Joy” – a transitional housing complex for post-discharge rape victims who’ve been banished by their husbands or communities, or are too psychologically damaged or fearful to return to their villages. “Very good,” Alfonsine says with a small, reserved smile. “I’ll speak with the press.”
 It’s complicated, but not impossible to deconstruct the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s long armed conflict, a war that has ended or ruined the lives of tens of millions of civilians within the region, but is only sporadically noticed beyond it. The conflict can be illustrated on timelines and maps. Its combatant groups have names and objectives. This is reassuring for the international community, since peace is easiest to broker when you know who’s fighting whom, where, when, why and with what weaponry.
Diplomats know that the turmoil began in 1994, when perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, fearing capture, hid themselves among the very people they’d been targeting for extinction and fled with them across the border to refugee camps in eastern Congo. Militia groups, sponsored by the new government of Rwanda and its ally, Uganda, moved in to ferret out the “genocidaires” and depose the man who was protecting them, Mobutu Sese Seko – a dictatorial head of state who, propped up for years by the United States and such giants of global financing as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, had brutalized his own country throughout the Cold War and beyond. Other African nations leapt to Mobutu’s defense, and a multi-country conflict erupted. Conflict brought chaos, and chaos attracted hordes of opportunists – different militia men, fanatic rebel groups, poachers from within the Congo and from neighboring countries – who saw a chance to do what western corporations have been doing since the late 19th century: a chance to plunder the country’s copious natural resources. They took up arms, donned uniforms if they could get their hands on any, and went to business.
The war’s opposing factions on the ground, however ragged and undisciplined, can be counted. Their firepower can be estimated and their leaders identified. Every one of the dozens of countries that have directly participated in or profited from the war can be pointed out on a map. The driving forces – ethnic hatred, retribution, lust for power, lust for wealth – are easily analyzed. Fatalities can be tallied. The fighting has alternately simmered and boiled since 1996, punctuated by short-lived periods of negotiated truce and the country’s first democratic election since 1960. The most recent full-scale battles began again in November, and 2008 brought another round of talks and, allegedly, another round of peace.
That’s the official war, the one fought among armed men, the one that will make it into the history books.
 And then there’s the other war, the one being waged against women – a campaign of brutal sexual violence intended to destabilize, dehumanize and destroy women and girls – and by extension, their families and communities. Every faction and splinter group has taken advantage of the fact that rape and sexual torture can easily be fashioned into a terrorist campaign to control civilians and punish those suspected of sympathizing with rival factions. That is appalling, but unsurprising. Like billions of women the world over, Congolese women have been oppressed, abused and exploited so regularly and for so long that the country’s history can be viewed as one long foreshadowing of today’s crisis. For an indifferent, male-dominated international community, the status of women is a low priority; for armed men with evil intentions, it’s an opportunity.
The DRC’s war against women may well be the most savage display of misogyny ever orchestrated in a conflict zone. But its victims will never be brought to a peace table. The international community will never send negotiators to work out a truce between marauding rapists and the women they torture. Why? Because according to the rule book, war is not war unless both sides are armed. If you don’t fight back, you are not “at” war.
One hopes, of course, that history will not repeat itself, and the latest ceasefire agreement will hold. One can hope that the UN Security Council will rethink its year-end decision to simply renew, rather than reinforce the 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force on the ground in the Congo – an area the size of Western Europe. One can even hold out hope that the world’s governments will act on their “Responsibility to Protect”, the principle – unanimously agreed in 2005 – that transfers to the international community the obligation to protect a nation’s citizens from serious harm when their own government is unwilling or unable to do so. At the moment, none of these scenarios seems likely to bring the official war to an end once and for all, but the mechanisms are in place to make them possible.
Not so in the case of Congo’s war against women, which started, coincidentally, during the decade when international courts first recognized rape as a crime against humanity. Prior to the 1990s, rapes during conflict were considered collateral damage, part of the undisciplined behaviour one regrets, but expects of soldiers. Now rape is identified as a weapon of war – a giant step in the right direction. Still to come is recognition that the systematic targeting of women in places such as the Congo makes rape more than a weapon. It is a combat tactic, a carefully planned strategy used to achieve military and political objectives. And it is stunningly effective.
Every faction has discovered that rape is an infinitely replenishable weapon that requires no training, no ammunition and no external financing. A single unarmed militia man can subdue, rape and torture a woman using brute physical force alone. Four or five can wrest control of an entire village wielding only knives or machetes. Warnings travel from village to village, destabilizing communities and dictating their movements. Knowing that nothing will be done to stop the attacks, civilians are forced either to flee or to surrender to the authority of their torturers.
Pure terror keeps women and girls at home, afraid to farm, collect water, haul firewood, seek help during childbirth, take sick children for medical care or follow any of the routines necessary to daily survival. And so sexual violence leads inexorably to mass deaths. The International Rescue Committee calculates that of the 5.4 million casualties of the war since 1998, an estimated 99 per cent were deaths by starvation and disease.
In amoral but pragmatic terms, campaigns of sexual violence make strategic sense. Armed factions on every side of the conflict are collectively responsible for hundreds of thousands of rapes, and each guilty militia group has military and political gains to show for its efforts: territory, control, or the forced displacement, illness, malnutrition and general devastation of a despised ethnic group.
And money. The DRC is rich with diamonds, silver, gold, copper, zinc, iron, tin, uranium, petroleum, cadmium, cobalt, coltan...and rain forests. Its mighty rivers have enough hydroelectric potential to power the entire African continent. But villages and communities have been built around and on top of much of that potential wealth, an inconvenient obstacle for anyone looking to exploit the country’s resources and export them. Controlling one resource in just one area can yield enormous profits, particularly if the civilian population can be pressed into service as mine workers and beasts of burden. It behooves a militia group – most of which have limited men, arms, munitions and cash for food and shelter – to pressure the civilian population into submission. Sheer force can be used by groups with enough soldiers and munitions, and coercion can be used by the hired henchmen of multinational corporations and other business ventures with enough money to lure the desperately poor. But of course there is even less risk involved, and it costs nothing, for a warring party to mount a terrorist campaign of sexual violence. And so all of them have.
Even amateur thugs understand that it isn’t hard to exploit a culture’s sexism. Mass rapes send an unmistakable message to civilian populations: feed us, clothe us, shelter us, mine for us. Refuse, and we will rape and torture the people you depend on to grow your food, fulfill your sexual desires, produce your children, collect your water, prepare your meals and care for your sick and elderly. We will destroy your women.
 As is true of rape anywhere, the means are primitive. Most often, women and girls report that they were dragged from their homes at night, or attacked as they tilled the fields by day. They are also ambushed as they carry water, walk to school and barter in the marketplace. They are rounded up during raids on their villages and raped while their husbands, parents and children stand at gunpoint, forced to watch. They are gang-raped – often repeatedly, and over periods that can stretch from hours of torment to years of sexual slavery – by men who rape again and again, knowing that it is all but certain they will never be caught, and even less likely they will be prosecuted. All females are fair game: great-grandmothers in their eighties; infants under a year old. Unknown numbers of women and girls have been victims of femicide – targeted because they were female, then subjected to terror and violence that ended in death. Additional tens of thousands have found their way to medical facilities, their insides ravaged by penises, knives, guns, tree branches, tin cans. Countless arrive naked, their limbs and backsides whipped until there is little skin left. Many have been impregnated. Testing can’t keep up with the numbers who have contracted HIV.
It’s hard to grasp how the world has managed to ignore this war on women as it plays out, day after brutal day, at the very center of the planet.
But had you witnessed a series of spectacular events in the Congo’s eastern region in late November, as I did, there is one thing you wouldn’t have found difficult to understand. Change is coming, and from surprising places. The very women and girls who’ve been terrorized, savaged by gangs and tortured to a point just this side of death have emerged from their pain shouting, Yame tosha – Enough is enough. The women of South Kivu are reclaiming their bodies and preparing to lead their communities back to health and safety. They are being supported by a campaign with a most unlikely pair of partners: UNICEF, the UN children’s agency now headed by a former Bush cabinet member, and V-Day, the anti-violence movement that grew out of Eve Ensler’s award-winning play, “The Vagina Monologues”.
We’re talking about a revolution. And it’s all starting at an oasis in hell called the Panzi Hospital.
I traveled with Eve and her longtime friend and co-activist, the documentary photographer Paula Allen, on their second trip to the city of Bukavu in the eastern region of the Congo. Security warnings prevented us from traveling across the lake to Goma, where bombings and gunfire were once again threatening the country’s fragile post-election peace. We spent most of our time in and around Panzi Hospital, a 350-bed facility with the gruesome specialty of repairing damage done to women and girls who’ve survived the most extreme forms of sexual violence.
 I was present when those women joined others – thousands of them – on the streets of Bukavu to protest the violence pressing in all around them. And I watched when hospital staff and patients, V-Day and UNICEF broke ground on the transitional housing complex for women who have been raped, tortured, hospitalized and repaired, or patched up enough – physically at least – to survive. The City of Joy is now just a plot of land adjacent to Panzi Hospital. On it, ten buildings will provide extended stays for 150 women who can’t return home, either because their families and communities have rejected them, or because of mental or emotional distress. There – and, if the world has any sense, in additional Cities of Joy that will crop up next to hospitals in poor and conflict-ravaged countries all over the world – the women’s movement will be given new life. There, women who’ve survived extraordinary pain are going to turn it into power.
I should say that I am not a natural optimist; I’m allergic to anything remotely corny. I’m neither demonstrative nor sentimental, and I admit that I often miss signs of hope that are blatantly obvious to almost everyone else. I am downright cynical about efforts to “save” Africa that feature heroic white protagonists. But you’d have to be dead and buried to meet the staff and patients at Panzi Hospital, to witness the holy alliance of unlikely partners they have drawn to their cause, to witness what’s happening – to the women, and because of them – and not to feel a surge of emotion, a rush of adrenalin, an impulse to stomp and hoot and cry and hug someone. The war on women in the Congo makes you so angry you could disintegrate, and this show of joint strength against it makes you so hopeful you could implode. After decades of groaning over all things trite, I’m ready to tattoo a slogan across my forehead; “Power to women and girls.” I am that certain that the revolution is coming.
What I’ve gleaned, though, is that before we get to power, it’s necessary to travel past pain. What happens at Panzi Hospital is difficult to see and harder to imagine. The personal accounts of the roughly 250 victims of sexual violence hospitalized there on any given day are tales so shockingly depraved and vile and nauseating that it feels almost like engaging in pornography to repeat them. And it is just that, if nothing comes of the accounts. But bearing witness can also be a first step to ending the violence.
 We were introduced to 10-year-old Mercy [some names have been changed] on our first day at Panzi Hospital, in the office of Dr. Denis Mukwege, the obstetrician/gynecologist who heads it. Mercy arrived at Panzi Hospital two weeks earlier. Her parents had been murdered during a raid on their village, and when the mayhem subsided, the child discovered that all of her relatives had been killed. She recalled seeing one uncle with a gunshot wound to the thigh, and so she walked toward Panzi, hoping that he’d headed there to be treated. Mercy’s experience had literally rendered her mute when she arrived. She did not find her uncle, but after two weeks in the cocoon of Panzi Hospital’s caregivers, she was finally able to speak. That’s when it emerged that the men who killed her parents had also raped Mercy.
In Dr. Mukwege’s office, the little girl is out of sorts. Her body language is that of any 5th grader wronged on the playground: arms crossed, lower lip thrust, eyes on her lap as she fights back tears of indignation. “A woman here told me it was my fault that my parents were killed,” she whines, referring to another patient. “That’s not true,” Dr. Mukwege assures her. “Everyone knows that’s not true.” But Mercy needs to report the great injustice that’s preying on her mind right now – the fact that when she identified her accuser to hospital staff, the woman denied saying that Mercy was responsible for what happened to her parents. “We believe you,” Eve Ensler chimes in, pulling the child onto her lap. Mercy laughs through her tears – she’s too big to sit on laps – but she allows herself to be cradled. “We all believe you, and we all love you,” Eve croons as she rocks her. “You’re just a little girl. It’s not your fault. That’s just not possible. That woman was wrong, and you’re right.” The little girl leans into this unexpected affection, sits for a while, and then slips back into her chair. “We’re marching through the streets of Bukavu on Saturday to demand an end to the violence,” Eve says. “Would you like to march with me?” Mercy is composed again. She cocks an eyebrow. “Saturday?” she says. “I’m busy. But I’ll try.” And a roomful of adults erupts in laughter that lasts for an inordinately long time.
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Congo’s 67 million people live in a country one-quarter the size of the United States. The lush eastern city of Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu, was once known as the pearl of the Congo. That was before perpetrators of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda dumped tens of thousands of victims in the lake and fled across the border to avoid capture. The country was soon pitched into a maelstrom of violence, displacement, starvation and disease that has since killed more people than any conflict since World War II. Today it is among the world’s poorest nations, ranked 167 out of 177 on the Human Development Index, a measurement of countries’ fitness to host humankind.
 Bukavu is now a city of contradictions. The topography is beautiful and lush; the streets decrepit. Crumbling mud huts, the better-appointed ones topped with corrugated tin, sit in the shadow of European-style mansions – elegant remnants of the 19th century rule of Belgian’s King Leopold II, arguably the most cold-blooded of Europe’s ruthless colonizers. His massive forced labour campaign raided the central African jungles of their abundant wild rubber using terrorist tactics, such as holding Congolese wives captive so that their husbands would work, and accounting for enslaved laborers by harvesting their hands. The brutality gave rise to history’s first international human rights movement, organized largely by a few men with typewriters.
Today the internet and 24-hour news makes staying informed about social injustices the world over as easy as flicking a switch. I can think of no way to explain the fact that before my recent trip to the DRC, I had never paid attention to columbium-tantalite, called ‘coltan’ for short. I had no idea that it is essential to the operation of laptops, cellphones and PlayStations, much less that eighty per cent of the world’s supply comes from surface mines in the DRC. I was ignorant of the fact that since the late 90s, workers – mostly young boys – have been digging, tunneling and sifting through clumps of dirt to extract the ore, and earning roughly 20 cents a day. Clearly, the ‘coltan rush’ of recent years is benefiting corporations and consumers around the world – some complicit in the exploitation, some ignorant of it. On the ground, the rush has been overseen by armed groups who fight for control of the mining areas – an objective partly achieved, of course, by mounting terror campaigns of sexual violence against the unfortunate people who happen to live there. I am stunned to discover that I’m part of the final link in this chain of barbarity, and tempted to hurl my Blackberry at the next rifle-bearing teenager who saunters by. But I don’t.
As fighting in the country’s eastern region escalated in November and December, the Security Council discussed extending the “UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo”, known as MONUC. With an annual budget of $1 billion and a force of 17,000, it is the largest UN peacekeeping operation currently deployed – though far from the largest ever sent to a conflict zone.
The Security Council decided to adopt a new resolution that extends MONUC without strengthening it, but that is nevertheless an improvement over previous mandates in one unexpected way: it contains strong language calling for an end to the sexual violence – in effect, reminding all governments of their “Responsibility to Protect” the women of the Congo:
“Condemning in particular sexual violence perpetrated by militias and armed groups as well as…security and intelligence services, stressing the urgent need for the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in cooperation with MONUC and other relevant actors, to end such violence and bring the perpetrators, as well as the senior commanders under whom they serve, to justice, and calling on Member States to assist in this regard and to continue to provide medical, humanitarian and other assistance to victims,"
MONUC has been re-authorized to use all necessary means to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence, and 994 police officers have been assigned to that job. Comparisons shed little light on how the Security Council makes such allocations: tiny Kosovo has twice as many international police for its two million people, a population 1/33rd the size of the DRC’s.
Panzi Hospital’s ambulatory patients – the vast majority – are fed en masse in ‘The Village’, a three-sided structure packed with tables, benches and a sea of women. This is where they spend the better part of their days, awaiting surgery, led in song, discussion, prayer and handicrafts by a tireless staff team of Social Assistants that doubles as the Panzi choir.
 Dr. Mukwege takes us to The Village to invite the women to the following day’s groundbreaking for the City of Joy. He glides to the center of the group, stopping now and then to rest his hand on a shoulder and check on a patient’s progress. I see none of the instinctive fear of men that haunts so many women in the aftermath of rape. Dr. Mukwege seems to represent all the good men in their lives, the ones they have loved and borne and trusted. A few patients have been there long enough to remember Eve from her last visit; some approach her shyly, and she responds with squeals and hugs. “Habari, Mamas,” the doctor calls out, and invites anyone who is willing and able to walk to the plot half a kilometer away and attend the next day’s ceremonies.
We’re taken next to the site of the groundbreaking, and a horde of boys swarms around us. A particularly small one joins the pack and without any provocation that’s apparent to the adults, the older boys turn on him. One lifts a small rock from the ground and bashes the little guy’s head. Dr. Mukwege intervenes, checks the head of the boy, who’s now huddled on the ground in tears, and fires a stream of indignant Kiswahili at the main perpetrator – who knows enough to stand still in the presence of this 6’4” authority figure, but seems completely unaffected by the tongue-lashing. The doctor disburses the pack and lets out a long sigh. “And so it goes.” Boys who’ve watched men do unspeakable things to women, and get away with them. Boys who will soon be men, growing up so terrorized by the violence they’ve witnessed that they rail against vulnerability – in themselves, in their mothers, in all the unarmed, non-violent women and children around them -- and label it weakness, eventually choosing to identify instead with the men who seem to be in control. The cycle is so evident that it’s hard to imagine how it can ever be broken.
 At the next day’s ceremony, imagining is easy. A crowd of patients – it looks as though everyone in The Village accepted the invitation – arrange themselves before a stage built overnight. There the City’s visionaries are seated – an uncommon alliance of battered women, the hospital staff who came to their rescue, a global children’s agency and a radical feminist movement. Drums, song and speeches from a rape survivor named Roslyn – defiant, strong and determined; from Dr. Mukwege – dignified, gracious, proud; and from Eve – buoyant, passionate, jubilant – have the women laughing and cheering, dancing and clapping, temporarily heedless of their pain. They relish Fantas, hoot and holler, beat their hands together furiously in response to cries for an end to the madness. It is clear that the women are moved beyond words by this recognition of their pain and their courage. Despite awkward, delayed translations, the women seem especially attuned to Eve -- their new white Western friend, this fellow rape survivor with an unshakeable belief that if we all join together, the world’s women will not only recover from violence, but triumph over it.
A tiny 11-year-old girl who said her name was LeJoi (and asserted that the City of Joy was being built for her, staring me down when I dared smile at her cockiness) was wearing rubber flip-flops, one too large and the other too small, both for a left foot. I didn’t ask why she was at the groundbreaking, or what brought her to Panzi Hospital. There comes a point when you just want to play tic-tac-toe, and pretend that there’s a tree-climbing story behind the filthy plaster cast on a little girl’s arm.
By standards I recall from my days as a UNICEF staff member, the City of Joy project is moving at lightning speed. I want desperately to believe that the unusual partnership with V-Day marks a turning point for the UN. Realistically, I know that this is the sum total of what the UN has to show so far for a 12-agency, worldwide collaborative effort, announced to much fanfare last year as “UN Action Against Sexual Violence”. I know that, as is so often the case, this project’s success is not organizational, but individual: three extraordinary staffers at UNICEF – one from Canada, one from the Congo, and one from Italy – have poured hours of time and energy into the project. They are typical of the strong, capable young women at the low end of the hierarchy who embody the best of the UN.  As I have so many times before – but this time, with more conviction – I pray that the UN’s listless, male-dominated, largely passionless bureaucracy won’t drive these exceptional women away in frustration. I want to believe that there is a Pernille, a Eugénie, a Francesca, in every UN office, and that they’ll find some way to join forces and revolutionize the system. For now, I am thrilled to see junior UNICEF staff members standing on a stage, confident that the top rank of their stodgy organization is fully behind their project, wearing t-shirts and buttons declaring themselves ‘Vagina Warriors’. Change is not just possible; it has arrived.
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That evening, planning resumes for the next day’s activities, which will start with a women’s march to launch Congo’s national campaign against sexual violence. As if to demonstrate that there is still a long struggle ahead, I’m told that a few senior bureaucrats – UN and government officials – are mounting one final attempt to cleanse the movement of words that speak of women’s strength. Senior bureaucrats, ever secure that they own anything to which they have allocated funding, ask for an 11th-hour conference call from their offices in the capital. Clearly, they have failed to grasp that the junior UNICEF staff in the eastern region, emboldened by Eve Ensler and the V-Day movement, have evolved into Vagina Warriors. The top brass and Vagina Warriors spar over language. ‘Femicide’ has very specific definitions, the officious UN officials warn, erroneously implying that all words rhyming with ‘genocide’ (homicide, fratricide, matricide...) refer to orchestrated attempts at total annihilation of a targeted group. The Vagina Warriors are unfazed. They know better. They know that technically, ‘femicide’ is the murder of a woman because she is a woman – and that the militias aren’t attempting to kill all women and end the human race. They also know that there is no word for attacks that are organized against women simply because they are women, and so ‘femicide’ will have to suffice. But mainly they know that because Eve, their independent spokesperson, is able to get people’s attention when she says ‘femicide’, she will shrug and keep using it until someone claps a hand over her mouth.
I’d almost forgotten the sandpaper effects of the UN’s opaque words and cautious movements, how they rub all the sharp edges down to a comfortable place where declarations and condemnations are delivered in monotone, and then hors d’ouevres are served. I’d nearly forgotten how those same words, first shaped into empty phrases like “gender-based discrimination”, “full realization of human rights”, “zero tolerance for impunity” and “gender empowerment”, then softened with overuse, still chafe at the skin of victims and activists.
Across phone lines, fearful UN bureaucrats joined forces with Congolese government officials to gang up on the phrase power to women and girls, insisting that it was more appropriate to call for the “rights” of women. Not debatable, the Vagina Warriors countered. Congolese women set this agenda, and they demand power.
Several technocrats asserted that the name “City of Joy” would set unrealistic expectations; at best it could be a ‘City of Hope’. The Vagina Warriors held their ground. Women who’ve been raped like the name, Eve explained. They’re anxious to reclaim joy. But you’d prefer to tell them that realistically, joy is beyond them now?
Well, just to play the devil’s advocate for a moment, a bureaucrat ventured – aren’t you afraid that providing food, housing and shelter over a protracted period will foster a culture of dependency? Eve sighed. “Isn’t that what it’s all about? Aren’t we supposed to be able to depend on each other?’
 Too many people depend on Dr. Mukwege. He admits that he can’t hear any more stories. Three other surgeons tell me that in order to keep functioning, they have to “shut their ears” after the third case of the day. There is no machismo here; the doctors nod vigorously when I ask if they themselves could benefit from psychological counseling. But with its small team of “Social Assistants” – paraprofessional counselors who are the first point of contact for the dozens of traumatized women and girls who arrive each week – and a single trained psychologist, addressing the secondary trauma of doctors and nurses is a luxury that may never make Panzi’ Hospital’s long list of pressing priorities.
Blood safety is high on that list. So many of the patients require transfusions that it is a constant challenge to keep a supply in reserve. In most cases, the blood of a family member is sought, and siphoned from donor to patient, stopping briefly for testing that, while the best in the region, still leaves a loophole through which HIV-tainted blood can pass. Again, hunger-induced weakness is an issue; more people would donate if the hospital could offer them a piece of bread or a glass of milk to restore their energy.
No one knows the real rates of HIV among patients at the Panzi Hospital. A year ago, most estimates were in the range of 15 per cent – 12 points higher than the official national rate among adults. But the majority of women are not tested. Anti-retroviral drugs are scarce, as is the food required to tolerate them. Nancy, a mother of eight who was banished from home with her children after the rape that destroyed her insides, is one of the relative few who has been tested, and knows that her attacker left her HIV-positive. She was managing her anti-retroviral drugs while still a patient at Panzi and still receiving meals supplied for inpatients by the World Food Program. Since her discharge, though, she is no longer eligible for UN food rations. Crowded into temporary shelter arranged by hospital staff and unemployed, she scrounges to provide one meal for her family each day, and those scant calories are no cushion against the effects of her powerful AIDS drugs.
HIV/AIDS is not the only crisis that eludes reliable statistics. Official UN records show a decrease in 2007 of reported rapes, but there’s nothing scientific about those numbers. Factors as immeasurable as pressure placed on desperately poor women by their rapists to accept hush money skew the statistics. Dr. Mukwege’s information seems far more reliable: the rape is constant, he tells us, and just weeks before, when he thought he had witnessed the depths of depravity, women began showing up at the hospital with their hands chopped off. Intake workers report that some women arrive for treatment a year or more after their rapes, unable to seek help until they’ve saved enough money for a trip to the health center. Other women decide not to report their rapes to doctors of police for fear that the militias responsible will come into power and rape them again. Panzi Hospital sends ambulances into the bush to seek out those victims; an average of 120 women and girls await their arrival twice a week.
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 As the groundbreaking ceremony for the City of Joy was winding down and before the patients and staff began to make their way back on foot, I rushed by car back to Panzi Hospital for a private tour of the grounds. Sparsely populated, the hospital is oddly bright and clean, with one-story brick buildings arranged in orderly rows, separated by plots of lawn and connected by covered cement pathways. From the outside, it could be a suburban North American middle school. A new building, the “fistula wing”, was added just months ago to treat the many patients whose rapists ripped holes through the women’s vaginas and into their bladders and rectums, so that constant, uncontrollable streams of urine pool at their feet and feces drip down their legs. The combination of large picture windows and white tiles covering floors and walls make the patient wards seem sunny and more cheery than sterile; cotton quilts in earth tones attempt to bring coziness to the rows of single beds.  Scrub sinks line halls with wooden doors that open into operating rooms capable of handling two surgeries at a time when a folding screen is placed between the gurneys. The rooms and halls are stunning for their cleanliness. You don’t need to ask why; it’s everywhere obvious that Dr. Mukwege sets a tone of quiet dignity. He knows that the women feel ashamed by their incontinence, that lingering evidence of it is a reminder that control has been wrested from them. He and his staff quietly, determinedly keep the hospital clean.
Dr. Roger Luhiriri, the young surgeon who is giving me this guided tour, takes me to the maternity area – in my experience, a corner of happiness and hope in most of the hospitals I’ve visited in the developing world. Here, the women who’ve just given birth rest on their cots in silence with their newborns by their sides. Most tend to them with gestures that seem rote at best, disinterested at worst. I’m reminded of the stories of Catholic high school girls of my generation who steeled themselves during “confinement” in homes for unwed mothers to avoid any emotional attachment to babies they’d be forced to relinquish for adoption. But these unnatural pairings are, of course, many layers more complex and fraught. I’m told that some of the women provide the minimal care required for survival, but never name the offspring of their rapists. The war on women has ethics and coping mechanisms that outsiders should not even attempt to understand.
Entering the cavernous post-operative ward is like stepping onto a World War I movie set. Several dozen iron cots are arranged in four long rows. Two nurses move quietly in the narrow spaces that separate the beds, stepping around drainage tubes that snake out from under sheets, avoiding the polyurethane bags that rest on the floor, half-full of yellowish liquid. They whisper to the patients, offer plastic cups of water poured from recycled gallon jugs that look as though they once contained cooking oil. There are no monitors, no beeping sounds, no feeding tubes or intravenous medicines hanging from metal poles.
Every bed is occupied by a casualty of the long-running, multi-country war that has pounded the eastern region of the Congo and consumed the center of the African continent for nearly a decade. All the patients are civilians; all are female. Every one has been raped and tortured.
There are no visitors.
I count 38 women and girls. After two days in post-op, they are moved to the women’s ward to make room for the next group of post-surgical patients. Today, and every day, another dozen women and girls will arrive at the hospital, their bodies battered inside and out, the delicate tissues that separate their digestive and reproductive systems so shredded that urine and feces seep into their vaginas and run down their legs. Each has a unique story so atrocious that had it happened in the West, newspapers would report every gruesome detail of the attack, the hunt for its perpetrators, the criminal court case. Here, it’s getting difficult to find a woman without a story.
 I move from bed to bed helplessly; there is nothing to do but whisper greetings, smile, hold a hand, stroke a forearm. “Jambo” we say to each other; “Habari”. Most are young and, perhaps just because they are so young, and their eyes are glazed over with pain medication, and their skin is dark and smooth against clean white sheets, they seem hauntingly beautiful. From the depths of their personal nightmares, they lift their heads and try to manage smiles, ever-gracious to muzungu – the foreign visitor. “Mzuri sana”, most of them say, which strikes me as odd and somehow symbolic. In much of east Africa, the usual response to “habari” — How are you? — is “mzuri”: Fine. Here in hell’s recovery room, it’s Mzuri sana; very fine.
The lump in my throat is constant.
A graying older woman rubs her temples with shaking fingers. I stroke her forehead, and she closes her eyes and surrenders to a head massage as though at a spa. I move around to the head of the bed so that if she opens her eyes, she won’t see the tears in mine, then quickly realize how foolish that is, The grief in this place is no secret.
Down the row, a younger woman sits up in bed, busily knotting brightly colored plastic twine into a handbag, an ‘income-generating project’ sponsored by the hospital. We buy several, and when I unzip my suitcase to unpack a week later, the smell of urine wafts out.
Across the room, a teenaged girl lies face down, out cold after her surgery. A baby, perhaps 18 months old, toddles the length of her mother’s bed, brow furrowed, grasping the iron frame: foot to head, head to foot, foot to head, head to foot. It occurs to me that I have never seen a child pace. My guide explains why there’s a baby in post-op. Many women are banished by husbands or villages or both after they’re raped, particularly those who can no longer control their urine and feces. They need surgery, but travel is difficult, they have no money, and there’s no one to care for their little ones. There may be slightly older children looking after themselves, waiting somewhere for her return. But what else can these mothers do but bring the smallest babies along?
The question of whether to describe vile atrocities or simply allude to them is a dilemma for every witness: Will descriptions make people feel angry enough to take action, or will they turn away in despair? Will people rationalize, claiming that this is normal behaviour in Africa? Is it pornographic to transport details of sexual violence from a country gripped by horror to one that markets it as entertainment? I had answered my own questions before I arrived: Decent people don’t make excuses for turning away; educated people know that sexual violence is a global phenomenon, and it escalates wherever it goes unpunished; ignorance protects no one.
 Ignorance took a blow on November 25th, the day after the groundbreaking ceremony for the City of Joy. On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the market women in Bukavu’s city center closed up shop. We joined the thousands of Congolese women and girls who took to the streets, stomping up and down the city’s hills for seven kilometers, shouting “Stop the violence!” and “Power to women and girls!” High school students, female police officers, business women and market vendors punched the air with fingers formed into Vs – some signaling peace; some victory over violence; the hundred or so who’d heard of V-Day identifying ourselves as Vagina Warriors. The women behind me chanted a song in the language of rural Congo: Haya mateso yame TOSHA! ENOUGH of this violence! I recalled something Dr. Mukwege told us – that the only words for “vagina” in Kiswahili are vulgar ones; that when he opened the hospital in the late ‘90s, women and girls who arrived there could not describe what had happened to them without literally adding insult to injury.
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Lillian is 9, and her bladder is shrinking. A first operation failed because the internal injuries she sustained during a gang rape have left her so damaged. Dr. Mukwege has been speaking to a team of surgeons from Boston about coming to Panzi to perform the specialized operation Lillian needs, but it’s possible that her age will make even that impossible; there just isn’t enough of a little girl’s tissue to stitch together. As a result, she pees constantly, and the shame of it is written all over her face. On the day of the march, a hot, sunny Sunday that left the marchers sweating, Lillian is wrapped in an adult’s borrowed ankle-length faux suede coat lined with lamb’s wool. By the time I see her in mid-ceremony, her skirt has already been changed twice by the “Social Assistants” from Panzi who act as chaperones to this bewildered child whose father was murdered and whose mother, also raped, is back in the village with several other small children. Lillian looks pained. Over the course of just a few days, we have watched her emotional deterioration: her body is twisted as though she were trying to escape from it, and her facial expressions alternate between vacant and panic-stricken. This must be the dread of impending disaster that terrorists hope to instill.
 Walking down the pitted city street lined with marchers, dancing and singing and linking arms, I was followed by a woman in the late stages of pregnancy who speaks just enough English to tell her story. “Survivor association,” she said, and pointed to her stomach. “Rape baby.” And she held out her hand and gave me a plaintive look. “Help me.” Is this really her story? I had been sternly warned by a few Congolese colleagues to ignore such women: they take advantage, they make things up, they’ll never go away. I nodded as though accepting that advice while silently screaming: Who cares?! So what if she’s a clever opportunist who has picked up on a new wave of Western sympathy for the victims of rape? What difference does it make whether her story is true? Her desperation certainly is. I slipped the woman a $20 and she disappeared into a group of marchers holding a banner that read, “Epouses du militaire contre la violence sexuelle.” Wives of military men against sexual violence.
The march culminated at the crest of a hill, on a flat lawn the size of several soccer fields spread out before a stately government building cordoned off from the crowds. At one end, a giant open-sided tent kept rows of folding chairs out of the midday sun. One hundred or more rifle-bearing police and soldiers formed a tight circle just inside the lawn’s perimeter, blocking most of the thousands of marchers who were scrambling up the hill’s muddy sides from reaching a level where they could see. An hour passed. Journalists within the lawn pointed their cameras at the tent; mid-level government and UN officials milled around.
A few lucky marchers up front squeezed together to make room, but the overwhelming majority stood balanced on the steep incline. There’s no doubt that the march ended in anti-climax for the women and girls, but their sheer numbers were invigorating, energy was still running high and they weren’t willing to let go yet.
 Suddenly overhead, a thunderous noise announced the arrival from Kinshasa of the first of two giant white UN helicopters. The women clapped and ululated, and the phalanx of armed guards moved toward them, shoving the front line to widen the circle. I watched in horror, but the throng somehow retreated without trampling one another or tumbling down the embankment. The helicopters descended in a windstorm and ejected their passengers to wild cheers from the crowd: First Lady Olive Lembe Kabila and her entourage; top UN officials – nearly all white males; ambassadors from Western countries and other senior members of the diplomatic corps. The First Lady walked the perimeter to raucous singing and clapping, then took her seat under the tent while men in jackets and ties jockeyed for positions beside or behind her, mindful of camera range.
I have attended countless similar events over the years, and this one followed the predictable pattern: national anthem; drummers and dancers in traditional dress; speech after sonorous speech, all too long and nearly identical but for customized paragraphs of self-congratulation; everything delivered in English, without translation, over screeching amplifier feedback. The sun-baked crowds stand in polite, uncomprehending silence; the bureaucrats mingle under the tent, catching up in conversational tones.
 This occasion was different for three reasons that seem minor, but each was promising. First, Eve Ensler spoke – an achievement on its own, given the fierce competition among and between officials for time at the mike – and the women hooted and cheered. Until that moment, just like Kiswahili, the UN’s lexicon had not included ‘vagina’, or ‘power’, or ‘femicide’.
Second, the 32-year-old First Lady listened carefully to the speakers, and when she took the microphone, she asked the media to sit so that the women behind them could see, and then spoke in the local language. Immediately after the event, she had a private session with several survivors, then announced to her entourage that she wanted to spend the night in Bukavu and visit the women at Panzi Hospital the next day.
And third, after loudly applauding each individual ambassador, the throngs of women let out a spontaneous, prolonged boo when the representative of MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force was introduced. No one under the tent could explain exactly what the booing meant, but it filled me with hope nonetheless. Opinion, courage, self-expression – I felt I was watching Congolese women take a giant step toward the balance of power. They are, as their new anti-violence campaign states, the Congo’s greatest natural resource. And like all endangered natural resources, they deserve protection.
But so far, the international community has offered women little more than words to ward off their rapists. The Security Council, noting the “scale and severity”, asked MONUC in December to come up with a better strategy to strengthen its prevention, protection and response to sexual violence – but it allocated no additional budget or personnel. And for his part, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced:
“…I have proposed that the General Assembly devote an agenda item every year to considering the question of violence against women. And I have called on the Security Council to establish a mechanism dedicated to monitoring violence against women and girls…”
Governments will discuss the violence once every 365 days, and watch it from a distance? I wonder how the women at the Panzi Hospital would respond, were they to hear that this is how the UN plans to come to their rescue.
Of course, they will never hear. The UN and its Member States can churn out proposal after proposal, report after report and declaration after declaration about violence against women. The words can be as pointed as the Security Council resolution that renewed MONUC’s mandate, or as vapid as the Secretary-General’s offensive ‘proposal’ to debate the issue once a year: it makes no difference. The words seem to be penned in disappearing ink:
July: UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women Yakin Erturk visits the DRC and reports on atrocities that “aim at the complete physical and psychological destruction of women”.
September: Under Secretary-General John Holmes visits the DRC and reports that it is the worst place in the world for women, and “sustained pressure is needed from around the world to make clear that this kind of shocking and appalling sexual violence must not be tolerated any longer.”
December: UN High Commissioner for Refugees visits the DRC, calling it “probably one of the worst situations in the world” and reporting that “Everywhere there is widespread abuse of human rights committed by armed groups and by the army, most shockingly the violence against women.”
December: The UN Security Council passes a resolution condemning the sexual violence and stressing the urgent need for the DRC government, MONUC and others, "to end such violence and bring the perpetrators, as well as the senior commanders under whom they serve, to justice…”
The circumstances were right for humanitarian intervention: every international emissary deployed to the region had come back and testified that the women of the DRC were under siege and at grave risk, and that the government was not protecting them. The timing was right for humanitarian intervention: every nation on earth had agreed in 2005 that they have a Responsibility to Protect , collectively, when civilians are suffering serious, ongoing harm and their own governments cannot or will not protect them. Expert after expert and witness after witness had used words that built an ironclad case in favor of invoking the Responsibility to Protect.
 And then, presto: a month later, the strong words vanished. In January, there were new peace talks. The proceedings were facilitated by the UN, and weeks later, the resulting ceasefire agreement was co-signed by the UN. It did not mention rape. It did not mention sexual violence. In fact, the entire accord refers to women exactly once – in its broad call for an end to violence, extortion, discrimination and exclusion of all civilians, “particularly women and children, the elderly and the disabled”. How ironic, that it should appeal for an end to exclusion. By excluding the war against women, the UN and every other party to the ceasefire agreement has engaged in an overt, unfathomable denial of every single pronouncement the UN has made up to this point: that rape is being employed as a terrorist tactic; that women’s bodies are being targeted; that the sexual violence is not at all arbitrary, but systematic and calculated, a strategic and integral component of the war. That it must be stopped.
Outrage would be entirely justified if omission had been the worst damage done to women by this ceasefire agreement, which was ceremoniously signed on January 23rd by the DRC Government and multiple representatives – of nine major militia groups, the Great Lakes International Conference, the African Union, the United States, the European Union and the UN, as well as thirteen men negotiating on behalf of ‘civil society’, the private sector and eight different religious groups. But the agreement went much farther than to exclude women; it fueled the war against them.
The militias were offered a deal: amnesty in exchange for arms. If weapons are surrendered, all acts of war and insurrection committed since June 2003 will be forgiven and forgotten. Four and a half years of depraved, misogynist terrorism and torture will simply disappear from the record, just as the UN’s horror and indignation over sexual violence evaporated into thin air after the Security Council’s resolution in December.
Around a peace table jammed with criminals and thieves, there is no evidence that victims of sexual violence were represented (another mockery made of the Security Council, which had ‘recalled’ its own Resolution 1325 just weeks before – the one that calls for women’s involvement in all peace negotiations.) In the absence of those women, impunity for the crimes committed against them was used as a bargaining chip, and negotiators traded away tens of thousands of victims' rights to justice.
No doubt the rapists feel vindicated: men who have choked women while raping them, cracked their skulls with rocks, broken their arms and legs, shoved human feces down their throats, hacked off their breasts, cut fetuses out of their bellies, pushed broken glass bottles into their vaginas, kicked them and urinated on them now believe they’ve been pardoned. What a victory for misogyny. What an endorsement of sadism. What a triumph for impunity.
The amnesty does not apply to “war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide”, though no doubt such distinctions are lost on the average militiaman. He may notice when a handful of military chiefs are brought to court for orchestrating mass rapes and systematic sexual violence, but long before that happens, he will deduce that no one plans to pursue the rank-and-file who committed the rapes. So why would he stop?
No sooner was the document signed than the UN resumed its self-contradictions. The Secretary-General welcomed the agreement, while his Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women disparaged it, saying it “does not take into consideration the sufferings of women or the needs of women. Those are the missing links in the peace process.” To her, the accord is simply a license to maintain the status quo. “These militants are demobilized and reintegrated either into civilian life or into the army and they continue the kinds of violent acts they were responsible for during the armed conflict…”
On February 22nd, yet another emissary of the UN Secretary-General returned from a 10-day reconnaissance mission to the Congo’s eastern region. A UN press release summarizing the findings of Walter Kälin, “Representative for the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons”, glosses nimbly over sexual violence. Yet its single reference to rape was enough to verify that the ceasefire has done nothing to stop it: “…grave human rights violations such as killings, rape and harassment continue to be perpetrated against the civilian population by not only different armed groups but also members of the national armed forces of the DRC.”
 Dr. Roger Luhiriri emailed in February, confirming that the war on women rages on. The half-dead keep hobbling to the door of the Panzi Hospital: 300 sexually abused women and girls in the month of January.
Ostensibly, since the ceasefire agreement doesn’t call for a ‘cease rape’, that number could double or triple and the Congo would still officially be at peace. And here’s another savage irony: rape is not a war crime unless you are ‘at war’. As we’ve learned, the war against women doesn’t count.
Among the questions that don't get asked when women aren't at the peace table is this one: What if brutalized women continue to show up at Panzi? Will reports of their rapes, verified by medical personnel, be enough to establish that the ceasefire has been breached? And exactly how many rapes, over what period of time, would that take?
Since I returned from the DRC I’ve been asked time and again, ‘Have you ever seen anything that approaches this level of barbarity?’ I think of the pregnant teenager waiting in a wheelchair near the door to Panzi Hospital’s labor and delivery room. I had smiled when I passed, but the young mother-to-be just blinked at me slowly, her eyes so flat they sent a chill up my spine. Or I flash back to the woman sitting up straight in her post-operative bed, briskly knotting colored twine into handbags. I think of how I yearned for happy endings for both women, scenes in which they leave Panzi and determinedly reclaim their lives. And then I think about how certain I am now that when the one is taking her baby to be immunized, or the other is taking her handbags to market, chances are very good that they will be set upon by men and viciously raped again, and again, and again. Because there is nothing to protect them, and nothing to stop the rapists.
People seem surprised when I say yes, I see something approaching that same level of barbarity everywhere. It’s in the detachment of the Security Council, which could have acted to protect Congolese women years ago and still hasn’t. It’s in the blood-chilling calculation of UN Secretaries-General past and current, who ignore atrocities that don’t make headlines. But most of all, it’s in the depraved indifference of 192 countries – and that takes in all of their citizens – who have claimed the Responsibility to Protect, but refuse to exercise it.
 The world has asserted, collectively, unanimously, that it has not only a right, but a responsibility to protect the extremely vulnerable from crimes against humanity. Laying claim to such a profound responsibility, and then withholding protection when it has never been more necessary – all the while understanding the inevitable, unthinkable consequences – that is barbarity. The world’s governments, speaking on behalf of each of us, have self-righteously declared that together, we can and must keep the world’s citizens safe. That leaves us just two choices where the Congo is concerned. We can all demand that our governments invoke the Responsibility to Protect, freeing the women of the Congo to move past their pain and on to power. Or we can stand at the sidelines instead, watching the carnage unfold, and accept our share of responsibility for crimes against humanity.
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The Agenda 
