Stephen Lewis at the Portraits of War: The Democratic Republic of Congo, photo exhibit held at Rayburn House in Washington, DC.

Many years ago, I did a series of radio interviews for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) with writers who had produced works of fiction on the Holocaust … the likes of George Steiner, William Styron, D.M. Thomas, Elie Wiesel. The series was called ‘Art out of Agony’, and was further enhanced by interviews with exponents of sculpture and film.

The force of that undertaking lives with me to this day. It taught me the power of culture to inform and shape opinion. But the medium that was missing, of course, was photography.

The exhibition on display here today, “Portraits of War”, shows just how powerful and evocative photographs can be when dealing with the most desperate of human themes-- in this case, the wanton, insensate sexual violence visited on the women of the Congo. While a direct analogy with the Holocaust would be misplaced, it is not misplaced to say that these images by four exceptional photographers capture the indomitable power of women under siege, and the accompanying essays drive home the torment and horror they’ve been forced to survive, in what has been described as the worst place in the world for women.

These pictures sear themselves into the brain. They need no narrative. They speak, as words can never speak, of the agony that art exposes. They teach, more than any lecture can ever teach, the heroism and resilience of women who face the perils of the damned, simply and solely because they are women.

But they do much more. They remind us of the fury of similar terrifying episodes in the catalogue of human iniquity. At this moment in time, Darfur looms large … and it is important to note that yesterday, the President of Sudan was charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes and crimes against humanity, with mass rape explicitly included in the dossier of guilt.

This is a man for whom a river of crocodile tears is being shed in Africa and beyond. Allow me a momentary digression: when I was Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF in the 1990’s, I met with al-Bashir on two occasions at summits of the Organization of African Unity. I pleaded with him, on behalf of UNICEF, to stop supporting the Lord’s Resistance Army in its lunatic abduction of adolescent boys and girls from Northern Uganda, turning the boys into child soldiers and the girls into sex slaves, taking them across the border into Sudan, there to suffer the worst imaginable physical and sexual assaults.

The President lied through his teeth. He expressed ignorance of any such happenings. He showed such a ruthless indifference to the plight of the children that it surprises me not at all that he should show an equal indifference to the raping and destruction of the women of Darfur.

The photographs remind us that the women of the Congo are not alone.  Such images merge, from country to country, wherever crimes against humanity stalk the land.

The organization I co-direct here in the United States, AIDS-Free World, has been engaged in a heart-rending venture over the last several months: we’ve been taking affidavits from Zimbabwean women, raped by Mugabe’s henchmen during the period of the election turmoil last year. The pattern that has emerged is diabolically clear: these are politically-motivated rapes, often accompanied by grotesque torture, directed exclusively at women who support the MDC, the political opposition.

In the instance of Zimbabwe, one of the predictable consequences of the sexual violence has been borne out. More and more women have become HIV-positive. The raping is so brutal, so violent, as to tear the reproductive tracts, tripling the likelihood of transmission of the virus.

And what is true in Zimbabwe, is true, with even greater force, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the assault against women continues year after year after year. In the little town of Bukavu, in the eastern reaches of the Congo, there stands the Panzi hospital where --- as you’ve heard --- a small group of surgeons, led by Dr. Denis Mukwege, attempt surgically to repair the women, and to treat HIV/AIDS.

So this photographic display allows the women of the Congo to speak directly to you, on behalf of women trapped in conflict everywhere.  The photographs cry out to you to reach and to move the new political apparatus in the United States, and attempt to bring the madness to an end.

Why should the onus be on the United States? Because all the other countries, including the other Permanent Members of the Security Council, know exactly what is happening and refuse to intervene. The world is filled with rhetorical bleatings of dismay, while the carnage continues. Resolutions are passed while the carnage continues. False treaties are consecrated while the carnage continues.

I deeply regret to say that the worst offender in all of this is the United Nations. And when I say the United Nations, I don’t mean the Member States, I mean the Secretariat, headed by the Secretary-General.

My colleagues and I have had it --- if I may use the vernacular --- with the feckless negligence of the United Nations. Too many women have paid for that negligence with their bodies and their lives to put up with it any longer. Individuals --- I’m one of them --- who support the United Nations against the attacks of right-wing neanderthals, are supposed to choke back any criticism we might have ourselves. But on the question of gender equality and violence against women, we’ve reached the breaking point … and if ever there was an issue requiring a global, multilateral response, it’s violence against women.

Just last week, the Secretary-General paid a ritual visit to the Congo. He stopped at a hospital in Goma in the eastern region and talked to some of the women. He never did make it to Bukavu and the Panzi hospital, although he had promised to do so, and the staff and women had scrubbed the hospital for days in anticipation of his visit. (As the sun shone on Bukavu, word came that he was ostensibly stopped by weather, with the emphasis on the word ‘ostensibly’). But whatever the nature of this pro forma stop in the Congo, the press statements that issued afterwards were so cursory and insubstantial as to mock the purpose of the trip. You could just see one of the Secretary-General’s aides sidling up to him at a press conference with a reminder: “throw in the phrase ‘sexual violence’ Mr. Secretary-General.” That’s how it feels when you read the text.

The Deputy Secretary-General, on the other hand, made a forceful speech on sexual violence at the opening this week of the current session of the Commission on the Status of Women. It rang with vivid phrases. It was strong and tough and emotional.

It would have been terrific ten years ago.

But time has moved on. Women are now looking for answers, not rhetoric. And of answers there were none. Indeed, instead of answers we got word that the UN is monitoring the carnage with a new database, “a one-stop shop for statistics and information on measures undertaken by Member States to address violence against women”, and otherwise “helping to raise awareness and to coordinate the system’s response.” What response? The peacekeeping forces themselves admit that they can’t meet the Security Council mandate to protect the women of the Congo, and what we get is a mind-numbing bluewash of the impossible situation in which the women find themselves.

The Deputy-Secretary General is absolutely right when she says, “State and non-State actors increasingly resort to violence against women as a weapon of warfare.  To terrorize, intimidate and destroy communities, to extract information, to take revenge or to achieve other political or military ends.  Indeed, sexual violence has become a tactic of choice for many armed groups.” Pity that she followed that observation with a passing of the buck: “But, it is stakeholders at the national level that bear the greatest responsibility for change.”  For sheer capacity at manipulative rationalization, I sometimes think that the upper echelons of the UN consort secretly with the upper echelons of the banks.

And to top everything off, there is something called UN Action, a consortium of twelve UN agencies brought together to intervene on behalf of the women of the Congo. The response  of one agency has been admirable, and of another one or two, passable. But taken altogether, “UN Action”, launched two years ago this month, is pathetic and reprehensible. If we had a functioning Secretary-General, he would call in every head of agency and read the riot act, demanding a day by day and dollar by dollar accounting of what’s been done and what will be done.

We at AIDS-Free World call the United Nations to account because it has, collectively, the capacity to turn things around. As always, it’s a matter of leadership, and the leadership is wanting. Where women are concerned in the United Nations system, it’s always wanting. For nearly sixty-five years, the UN has upheld the rights and needs of the women of the world in its words, and disavowed them in its actions. When in heaven’s name does it come to an end?

How many bodies, how much violence, how many rivers of blood does it take to jolt the United Nations leadership out of its paralysis?

In the DRC, we must have three times the current number of peacekeepers, so the women can actually be protected from the marauding insanity of the rapists. In the DRC, we need a phalanx of police brigades made up of women. In the DRC, we need a massive mobilization of UN agencies on the ground to provide healthcare and medicine and housing and food. In the DRC, we need financial resources for the brave groups of activist women in the trenches fighting for change at every level.

In the DRC, we need the implementation of the principle of “Responsibility to Protect” civilians when their governments can’t or won’t, a principle on which the entire United Nations family has agreed, and a principle that is lifeless through lack of leadership.

Instead of this panorama of action, we get speeches and press releases that will pour forth yet again, in self-righteous suffocation, on International Women’s Day three days hence.

This superb photo exhibit is incredibly important. It reminds us of what’s at stake. It reminds us that time has run out; that for hundreds of thousands of women, their bodies are broken forever. You can’t retrieve that. You can’t turn the clock back. But you can prevent it from happening to another hundred thousand. And everyone in this room can clamour for action from a new administration that promises hope where despair and cynicism now prevail.

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