Atrocities (and still ongoing!!!) beyond human
description.
Both articles are written by Nicholas Kristof, a journalist for The
New York Times.
http://members7.boardhost.com/TrueCatholic/msg/1265583140.html
It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious
figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six
million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to
assume that we’d do better.
But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only
lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed
more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll
at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That
would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9
million.
What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the
world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear
survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman
of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents
disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps
they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she
moved in with her uncle.
A few months later, the extremist Hutu militia invaded the home.
She remembers that it was the day of her very first menstrual
period — the only one she has ever had.
“First, they tied up my uncle,” Jeanne said. “They cut off his
hands, gouged out his eyes, cut off his feet, cut off his sex
organs, and left him like that. He was still alive.
“His wife and his son were also there. Then they took all of us
into the forest.” That militia is known for kidnapping people and
enslaving them for months, even years. Men are turned into porters,
and girls into sex slaves.
Jeanne and other girls were regularly tied spread-eagle and
gang-raped, and she soon became pregnant. The rapes continued,
sometimes with sticks that tore apart her insides and left her
dribbling wastes constantly. Somehow the fetus survived, but her
pelvis was too immature to deliver the baby.
One of the people the militia had kidnapped was a doctor who was
forced to treat the soldiers. The doctor, seeing that Jeanne was
close to dying in obstructed childbirth, cut her open with an old
knife, without anesthetic, and removed the stillborn baby. Jeanne
was delirious and almost dead, so the militia dumped her beside a
road.
“She was completely destroyed inside,” said another doctor,
Denis Mukwege, who saved her life after she was brought here to
Bukavu. Dr. Mukwege, 54, presides over the 400-bed Panzi Hospital,
supported by the European Union and private groups like the Fistula
Foundation. He is sometimes mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel
Peace Prize for his heroic efforts to fight the war and heal its
victims.
Dr. Mukwege operated on Jeanne nine times over three years to
repair the fistulas that were causing her to leak wastes. Finally
he succeeded, and she returned to her village to live with her
grandmother.
“He told me to stay away from men for three months,” Jeanne
remembers, to give her body time to heal. But three days after she
returned to the village, the militia came again and raped again.
The fistula reopened.
Jeanne, kept naked in the forest and stinking because her
internal injuries had reopened, finally managed to escape and
eventually found her way back to Panzi Hospital. Dr. Mukwege has
already started a second round of surgeries on her, but there is so
little tissue left that it is not clear she can ever be continent
again.
About 12 percent of the raped women he treats have contracted
syphilis, and 6 percent have H.I.V. He does what he can to repair
their injuries and help them heal — until the next time.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I am doing here,” Dr. Mukwege said
despairingly. “There is no medical solution.” The paramount need,
he says, is not for more humanitarian aid for Congo, but for a much
more vigorous international effort to end the war itself.
That means putting pressure on neighboring Rwanda, a country so
widely admired for its good governance at home that it tends to get
a pass for its possible role in war crimes next door. We also need
pressure on the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to arrest Gen.
Jean Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court on
war crimes charges. And, as recommended by an advocacy organization
called the Enough Project, we need a U.S.-brokered effort to
monitor the minerals trade from Congo so that warlords can no
longer buy guns by exporting gold, tin or coltan.
Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo —
fueled by profits from mineral exports — will continue
indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll
reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a
third time?
----------------------------------------
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24562.htm
February 02, 2010 "New York Times" January 31, 2010 -- Sometimes
I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so
that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric
civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World
War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti
earthquake.
Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per
million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.
That’s why I’m here in the lovely, lush and threatening hills
west of Lake Kivu, where militias rape, mutilate and kill civilians
with a savagery that is almost incomprehensible. I’m talking to a
9-year-old girl, Chance Tombola, an orphan whose eyes are luminous
with fear.
For Chance, the war arrived one evening last May when armed
soldiers from an extremist Hutu militia — remnants of those who
committed the Rwandan genocide — burst into her home. They killed
her parents in front of her. Chance ran away, but the soldiers
seized her two sisters, ages 6 and 12, and carried them away into
the forest, presumably to be turned into “wives” of soldiers. No
one has seen Chance’s sisters since.
Chance moved in with her aunt and uncle and their two teenage
daughters. Two months later, the same militia invaded the aunt’s
house and held everyone at gunpoint. Chance says she recognized
some of the soldiers as the same ones who had killed her
parents.
This time, no one could escape. The soldiers first shot her
uncle, and then, as the terrified family members sobbed, they
pulled out a large knife.
“They sliced his belly so that the intestines fell out,” said
his widow, Jeanne Birengenyi, 34, Chance’s aunt. “Then they cut his
heart out and showed it to me.” The soldiers continued to mutilate
the body, while others began to rape Jeanne.
“One takes a leg, one takes the other leg,” Jeanne said dully.
“Others grab the arms while one just starts raping. They don’t care
if children are watching.”
Chance added softly: “There were six who raped her. One raped
me, too.”
The soldiers left Jeanne and Chance, tightly tied up, and
marched off into the forest with Jeanne’s two daughters as
prisoners. One daughter is 14, the other 16, and they have not been
heard from since.
“They kill, they rape, burn houses and take people’s
belongings,” Jeanne said. “When they come with their guns, it’s as
if they have a project to eliminate the local population.”
A peer-reviewed study found that 5.4 million people had already
died in this war as of April 2007, and hundreds of thousands more
have died as the situation has deteriorated since then. A
catastrophically planned military offensive last year, backed by
the governments of Congo and Rwanda as well as the United Nations
force here, made some headway against Hutu militias but also led to
increased predation on civilians from all sides.
Human Rights Watch estimates that for every Hutu fighter sent
back to Rwanda last year, at least seven women were raped and 900
people forced to flee for their lives. “From a human rights
perspective, the operation has been catastrophic,” concluded Philip
Alston, a senior United Nations investigator.
This is a pointless war — now a dozen years old — driven by
warlords, greed for minerals, ethnic tensions and complete
impunity. While there is plenty of fault to go around, Rwanda has
long played a particularly troubling role in many ways, including
support for one of the militias. Rwanda’s government is dazzlingly
successful at home, but next door in Congo, it appears complicit in
war crimes.
Jeanne and Chance contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Like
other survivors in areas that are accessible, they receive help
from the International Rescue Committee, but Chance still suffers
pain when she urinates.
Counselors say that most raped women are rejected by their
husbands, and raped girls like Chance have difficulty marrying. In
an area west of Lake Kivu where attacks are continuing, I met Saleh
Bulondo, a newly homeless young man who was educated and spoke a
little English. I asked him if he would still marry his girlfriend
if she were raped.
“Never,” he said. “I will abandon her.”
A girl here normally fetches a bride price (a reverse dowry,
paid by the husband’s family) when she marries. A village chief
told me that a typical price would be 20 goats — but if the girl
has been raped, two goats. At most.
Thus it takes astonishing courage for Jeanne and Chance to tell
their stories (including in a video posted with the on-line version
of this column). I’ll be reporting more from eastern Congo in the
coming days, hoping that the fortitude of survivors like them can
inspire world leaders to step forward to stop this slaughter. It’s
time to show the same compassion toward Congo that we have toward
Haiti.