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January 16, 2005
Sigh.
This weekend has been a mix of laziness and mind-numbing awe at the cruelty of the world. After spending a large portion of Friday night researching women's rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I had a night filled with horrible nightmares—all involving variations of sexual violence.
Saturday, I chose to take a break from human rights research and instead spent the day lazing around the apartment. I finished listening to my latest audiobook, downloaded an RSS feeder (brilliant!), and finally managed to connect with my mom via Skype (also brilliant!). In the end, nothing much was accomplished—but sometimes its nice to have a day like that.
Today I was up at 9 a.m.—entirely of my own volition—and had a nice breakfast with Roya, Jess, and Mandy, who were congregating to work on their project. They've been working here all day, poor things, and it looks like its going to be an all-nighter. I'm sure they will be thrilled when their presentation is done tomorrow afternoon.
For my part, I finished sorting the recycling and took it down to Willy:s to the parking lot of recycling receptacles. I am disappointed that Kungsmarksvägen still hasn't gotten its own recycling facilities, since it's a real pain to drag six bags of sorted garbage a quarter of a mile (and I feel like an idiot) to its final resting place.
On the other hand, I needed to do some grocery shopping anyway, so I wasn't going out of my way. I was pleased to see that Willy:s has redesigned its layout to be much more consumer friendly—even if the produce section is still in a deplorable state.
Armed with a backpack full of groceries, I walked back to the apartment and continued working on the DRC report. Reading reams and reams of human rights documentation is hard, and I can tell I'm being psychologically affected. The level of atrocities being committed there every day is just mind boggling—and there is a sense of helplessness associated with it. The more and more I learn about human rights violations, the more I have come to believe that it is something that cannot be affected by outside forces. In fact, sometimes the opposite happens. For example, the UN peacekeepers sent to the DRC were just recently found (by a UN investigation) to be sexually abusing and exploiting the very people they were supposed to be protecting. I just can't fathom exchanging sex for two eggs—eggs that went to feeding someone's children, no doubt. And yet, there it is—hundreds of pages documenting the abuse.
And when an entire generation of people has lost their cultural memory of stability—when rape, "disappearances", and extrajudicial executions are the norm—when stable jobs, medicine, and the idea of "home" are long vanished, then barbarism becomes the norm. These women live in constant fear of gang rape by any of the 20 armed militias—and many have been raped on repeated occasions. And simple rape is hardly the worst of it. There are permutations of rape that I would have been incapable of imagining, had it not been explicitly documented by multiple women.
It's traumatizing to me—and I'm just reading about it. How can people continue to live conditions like that?
Sigh. I promised myself that I wouldn't work on this project after 3 p.m. to give my mind some time to re-adjust to the normal world. But I feel compelled to keep working—as if writing this paper somehow keeps these atrocities from being meaningless. It doesn't—of course.
From my experience with human rights, I have yet to see large-scale human rights reforms based on external pressure. As dedicated as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are—as powerful as their documentation is—countries continue to promote torture, rape, systematic injustice. Even taking a long-term perspective, I'm not sure that we are getting more civilized. America certainly isn't. We may have abolished slavery and internment camps, but we have substituted it with "enemy combatant" camps in Guantanamo Bay, partnerships with the atrocity-committing Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and Abu Gahrib in Iraq.
So why do I do it? Maybe so that I won't get complacent. So that I keeps remembering all that I have and all that I could lose. So that someone, somewhere, shares a tiny piece of the pain these women feel.
