Paula Donovan, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, addresses the XVII International AIDS Conference session Political Crises, Sexual Violence and HIV in Mexico City.
It is now 11:06 p.m. on August 7th in the city of Bukavu, in the province of North Kivu, in the war-torn eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Panzi Hospital, the post-operative ward is dark and quiet, except for the moans of the two dozen or so women who underwent surgery today to repair their shredded vaginas.
Down the hall, another 100-plus women and girls fill the beds of the fistula ward, hopefully waiting out the recuperative period that will ascertain whether their recent operations succeeded in mending the internal ruptures they sustained when their attackers drove penises, sticks, bayonets, tree branches, broken bottles or gun barrels into their vaginas. And across the hospital grounds, several hundred more wait in misery for their turns on the operating table, unable to control the feces and urine that have been running down their legs since the brutal rapes that ripped fissures between their rectums or bladders and their vaginas, knowing that the flow of feces and urine will continue to stain their clothing and pool at their feet and create a stench around them until they are operated on – and if their surgery fails, for the rest of their lives.
Tens of hundreds of other survivors of rape ranging in age from eight months to 80 years have not been seen by a medical person since they were raped. Right now they crouch in the displaced persons’ camps where they fled after their attacks; they cower in the bush, where they have taken refuge since being driven from their homes by angry, confused husbands and fathers who cannot fathom why their wives or daughters were raped, and concoct rationales for the inexplicable: ‘she must have been asking for it’.
Each woman and girl has a different horror story to tell. Some were snatched on the way to school and held captive for days, tied to trees and raped over and over and over again. Some were attacked as they farmed their fields, or as they walked to collect water, or lugged goods to market. Ten-year-old Mercy was playing near her home when her village was raided by armed militiamen. She watched in silent horror and then somehow made her way to the Panzi Hospital where, weeks later, she regained the voice she’d lost and told nurses her situation: the militias had raped her, and murdered her parents and all the members of her family.
Throughout the region, hundreds of thousands of women are attempting to sleep, alert for the sounds of those marauding gangs of militias. They live under constant terrorist threat, knowing that theirs might be the next village taken. They know that at any moment, armed thugs may crash into their homes, round up the men and boys and force them to form a circle and watch as the women and girls are dragged to the center by their feet or their hair. They wonder if they’ll make it through another night without meeting the fate that has been dealt so many other Congolese women – without being stripped naked, without having their breasts and buttocks whipped until the skin falls off in bloody clumps, without being hurled to the ground and raped by soldier after soldier, without feeling the steel of a militia man’s gun barrel in their vaginas and hearing the explosion when he pulls the trigger, without choking on semen, without watching a machete come down on their wrists and seeing their severed hands fall to the ground as their stupefied husbands and brothers and children stare in petrified disbelief, unable to come to their aid.
Here in Mexico City, it is just after 5:00 p.m. Twenty-three thousand delegates have been given copies of the most recent UNAIDS report, in which we‘ve read that,
“ In several African countries, the risk of HIV among women who have experienced gender-based violence may be up to three times higher than among those who have not.”
and,
“In parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo affected by conflict, the prevalence of rape is believed to be the highest in the world (McCrummen, 2007).”
And that’s the end of that.
At the United Nations in New York, the business day has just ended. The Security Council did not discuss the Democratic Republic of the Congo today; that item is not on the program again until August 15th, when yet another experts’ report is due. Ten days later, on August 25th, the Council will hold consultations on the experts’ report. During that time, if August in the DRC follows July’s pattern, at least 660 brutal rapes will be reported in North Kivu province alone; countless others will be committed, but their victims will not report them.
And it’s little wonder. Reporting their sexual assaults must seem an entirely futile exercise in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where rape and sexual torture have been used since the first days of a war that began in 1996 and has alternately raged and simmered ever since, occasionally suspended for short-lived periods of negotiated truce and the country‘s first democratic election since 1960.
I visited Bukavu in November, just as the most recent full-scale battles were beginning again, just as the mandate of “MONUC”, the UN peacekeeping force deployed to the DRC by the Security Council, was up for renewal. My visit was preceded and followed by visits from any number of high UN officials.
The previous July, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women had returned from her visit with reports of atrocities that “aim at the complete physical and psychological destruction of women”.
In September, UN Under-Secretary-General John Holmes had visited the DRC and reports that it was the worst place in the world for women, and that “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.”
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees would echo that sentiment shortly afterward, in December, describing the campaigns of sexual violence as 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.”
Later that month, the UN Security Council passed 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…” But when it came time to reassess the peacekeeping force, the Security Council determined that together, the world’s governments could not afford to strengthen MONUC. Instead they simply renewed its mandate, maintaining a force of 17,000 blue helmets, including 994 police. That’s the largest peacekeeping force currently deployed anywhere in the world – but its size has to be seen in context. The DRC’s 68 million people are spread across a country the size of Western Europe. Once the Security Council members had made their decision, they adjourned to the streets of New York, a city of 8.2 million people protected by 37,838 uniformed police.
Even without the testimonies of the vast majority of rape victims, it was clear that circumstances were right for humanitarian intervention. The Security Council didn’t expand MONUC’s numbers, but it did explicitly direct the peacekeepers to protect the Congolese women against the violence. 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. And the timing was right for humanitarian intervention: every nation on earth had agreed in 2005 that collectively, they have a “Responsibility to Protect” when the civilians of a country are suffering serious, ongoing harm and their own governments either cannot or will not protect them. Expert after witness after expert after witness had forcefully condemned the violence with words that formed an ironclad case in favor of invoking the Responsibility to Protect.
And then we turned our calendar pages to 2008, and the strong words vanished. In January, there were new peace talks. Those 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.” Ironic, the reference to exclusion: by excluding the war against women from the agenda, the UN and the other 21 parties that signed the ceasefire agreement had engaged in an overt, unfathomable omission, in contravention 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 a systematic, calculated, strategic and integral component of the war. That urgent measures must be taken to stop it.
If only omission were the gravest sin committed against women during the January 23rd ceasefire agreement. But the agreement went much farther than to exclude women: it boosted the war against them. The militias were offered a deal: amnesty in exchange for arms. If weapons were surrendered, it was agreed, the acts of war and insurrection committed since June 2003 would be forgiven and forgotten. Two hundred and thirty-two weeks of atrocious, malevolent, misogynist terrorism and torture would simply be expunged from the record, just as the UN‘s revulsion and indignation over sexual violence had vanished right after the Security Council‘s resolution the month before. Around a peace table packed with criminals, rapists, extortionists and thieves, the victims of sexual violence were absent (an act of exclusion that seemed almost designed to make a farce of the UN and its Resolution 1325, passed by the Security Council years ago to guarantee that women must be present at every peace table.) The invisibility of women during the January negotiations should have been a signal to the world that even if the official war were to end, the raping would continue. In the absence of 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 felt triumphant, their heinous acts justified: thugs who had strangled women with their bare hands, strangled, spit on and bitten them while raping them, bashed their skulls, crushed the bones of their pelvises, arms and legs, shoved human feces into their mouths, hacked off their breasts, gouged fetuses out of their bellies, pushed broken glass and rusted tin cans into their vaginas, kicked them and urinated on them were told, in effect, that their crimes were not that serious. The offer of amnesty was an endorsement of femicide, an encouraging nod in the direction of sadism, a triumph for impunity.
It was an assurance that the only war that matters is the one fought among men, the one that will be documented in the history books.
The women I met in Bukavu know that they are victims of another war, 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. They know that the war against women is meant to drive them off of their land, bend them into slaves or starve them into corpses. They know that it is not the war among armed men, but the war against women in the DRC that has claimed more lives than any other since World War II. They know that as ragged and undisciplined as their attackers are, the roving militias have a plan. And it’s working.
Not long after the UN sat at a peace table and bartered away women’s dignity in exchange for a phony commitment by their rapists to give up their arms, the Secretary-General made one of his many repetitive announcements of a campaign to end violence against women – a campaign uniting the work of 12 UN system entities, of which UNAIDS is one. It is a campaign that has been launched and relaunched and launched again, but it never leaves the ground. Unlike the shabby militiamen, the UN has no plan. Its plan is simply to declare, over and over again, its intention to plan.
Meanwhile, the rapists keep raping.
So volatile, menacing and brutal has sexual violence become – even since the peace accord was struck — that last June 19th, the Security Council declared that violence against women must be considered a matter of international security. It was unprecedented. Eight years earlier, HIV/AIDS was similarly cast by the Security Council. Obviously, these two international security matters are inextricable. Surely, that June declaration would act as a trigger for the 12 UN entities that are party to the so-called “UN Action Against Sexual Violence”. Surely now, they would devise a real plan of action to meet the demands of the Security Council. Surely, UNAIDS would listen with alarm to the words in the resolution, and insist on appearing before the Security Council when they noted that HIV/AIDS is nowhere mentioned in the resolution.
Surely. But we waited, and none of that happened. Instead, the international community’s silence confirmed our worst fears – that the Responsibility to Protect is nothing more than a document, left to yellow on the bookshelves of bureaucrats, dusty with neglect. We waited, and in July, Human Rights Watch issued a report, after investigation, indicating that the murdering and the raping were still out of control in the DRC. To quote directly: “Six months after the peace agreement was signed there has been no improvement in the human rights situation and in some areas it has actually deteriorated.” The Human Rights Watch researchers documented the rape of hundreds of women and girls since January by all armed groups, including Congolese army soldiers.
That’s a current catastrophe on top of a former cataclysm. Neither the exact prevalence rates nor incidence rates of HIV are important here; what is important is the certainty that large numbers of women and girls are being infected, and countless more live in daily terror, helpless to prevent sexual attacks or protect themselves against the virus. What’s important is that the world’s governments have every agreement, every policy, every declaration, every commitment, every mechanism in place, poised and ready to stop the war on women. And so far, none of that has made any difference to a single woman or girl in the Congo.
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