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January 18, 2005
DRC Madness
Sometimes life is filled with such juxtaposition of the mundane and the tragic that it is difficult to decide on an appropriate emotion. For example, during my research on the DRC today, I wrote the following:
1. Gender-Based Violence and Exploitation
Sexual violence against women of all ages, including very young girls, was used as a weapon of war by most of the forces involved in the conflict. In many cases rape was followed by the deliberate wounding or killing of the victim. Thousands of women and girls were abducted and forced to remain with armed groups as sexual slaves. The prevalence of HIV/AIDS among combatants added to the trauma and social stigma faced by these women, who feared being ostracized by their families or communities. Medical and psychological treatment appropriate to the needs of the victims was rare. Leaders of armed groups have taken few meaningful steps to protect women and girls against rape by their fighters, and few of those responsible have been brought to justice.
---March 2004 PeaceWomen Report.
Around 40,000 cases of rape have been reported since the 1997 overthrow of the government—but those figures represent only a portion of the women affected by rape. International human rights organizations acknowledge the difficulty of establishing estimates, as "the lack of security in many regions, the inaccessibility of some locations and the physical or material inability of some victims to travel, make it very difficult to obtain clear data." Moreover, fear of reprisal and cultural norms prevent many women from reporting their attacks. Nonetheless, experienced UN and international humanitarian NGO staff are "unanimous that they had never come across as many victims of rape in a conflict situation as they had in DRC."
While human rights groups have documented detailed accounts of rape victims, the following list provides only a glimpse of the situation in the DRC:
- Amnesty International has documented cases of rapes of girls aged under 10 and of women aged 70 and over. Other reports have alleged rapes against girls as young as one year.
- One aspect of the prevalence of rape by combatants in eastern DRC is the high number of women who have been raped more than once, at different times, by different forces.
- Women and girls are attacked on the roads, in the fields or inside their homes. Attacks also take place as children walk to and from school or as families walk to attend church. If other family members protest or try to protect the woman, they are killed or beaten.
- Rape is also often followed by looting of household possessions or goods women are carrying. After raping them, combatants will occasionally force the victims to carry the looted property.
- Rape may be committed by a group numbering up to twenty. These rapes are often also committed in front of the victim’s children, family or community.
- In some cases, combatants force victims have sexual relations with members of their family: sons with their mother, or brother with sister.
- Collective rapes of a number of women together are also common. Such rapes are particularly committed against rural populations. Commonly groups attack a village, killing civilian men and boys and raping women and girls, before making off with the community's cattle, tools or clothing and sometimes setting fire to the houses.
- Rape is generally accompanied by beatings and threats, and in many cases other extreme acts of torture are also used. Some women have had a rifle, a knife, a sharpened piece of wood, glass or rusty nails, stones, sand or peppers inserted into their vaginas, causing serious physical injury and suffering. Others have been deliberately shot during or after rape, sometimes in their genitals.
- Rape ends in some cases with the killing of victims. In some cases combatants shoot dead the victims’ husbands, sons or other family members before committing rape next to the corpses of their loved ones.
Now, it's interesting to note that I had to spend more time on aligning the bullet points (for some reason Word wanted to move them over to the middle of the page) than I did writing the actual information (which is largely copid from an Amnesty International report). I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time over the absurdity of formatting bullet points containing information like this. I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
I'm getting closer to the end of this research project (thank goodness--my mental health is starting to take a beating), but I need to go back and find more information on topics that I missed in the intitial data collection--like arranged marriages, contracts and property rights, etc. Hopefully, this second round will be less traumatizing.
As for the rest of my day, I enjoyed presentations on Groovy Green Geeks (a start-up business in
Now I'm home, trying to do a little DRC research before 6 p.m., when I meet with my Strategic Management group for the last time. We'll go over the paper once more, then print it out and make a CD for Tarkett Group. And then, we'll hand everything in tomorrow morning and be done with it. I'm thrilled to have this off my shoulders--if only I could manage to bring the Advanced Leadership project to a close.
Finally, I'm going to Lithuania this weekend! More details to follow...
