In early May, the international medical humanitarian organization, Médecins Sans Frontières, reported that within just a fortnight, they had provided care to 674 victims of sexual violence in camps for displaced people around Goma, the capital of eastern DR Congo’s North Kivu province.
Sadly, despite the sustained engagement of multiple local and international humanitarian organizations on the ground, sexual violence in eastern DR Congo has continued at such a catastrophic scale that Goma is now known as the rape capital of the world.
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It would be a mistake to view the sexual violence in this region as sporadic or simply a consequence of conflict. What is occurring in DR Congo bears an uncanny similarity to the organized sexual violence that took place in Rwanda during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. This is because Interahamwe militias and ex-Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) — who, upon defeat, crossed into eastern DR Congo and later formed FDLR— conceptualized rape as a weapon for political control that could shatter and destroy entire communities.
When the Rwandan Patriotic Front ended the genocide against the Tutsi in July of 1994, an estimated half a million women had been subjected to various forms of sexual violence, including gang rape, torture, sexual enslavement, and mutilation. The rapes committed in Rwanda were so horrific and orchestrated that in September 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda rendered a historic judgment in Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, becoming the first international criminal tribunal to define rape as an act of genocide.
As the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon puts it, this is not rape out of control. "It is rape under control. It is also rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and never want to go back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told to others; rape as spectacle.”
In the areas they control in DR Congo, the FDLR has similarly weaponized rape to assert their power. One particularly nauseating instance of this strategy was used on July 30, 2010, when members of the FDLR raped more than 280 women and minors in North Kivu province as punishment for the villagers&039; alleged support for the Congolese army (FARDC). Gang rape, sexual slavery, forced rape between victims, and rape in the presence of family members; the breadth of the horrors FDLR has unleashed in DR Congo are indistinguishable from the crimes they committed in Rwanda in 1994.
When I heard Congolese Minister of Communication Patrick Muyaya sanitize the FDLR by calling it "a movement," not an illegal armed group, I thought about the pain, fear, and torment of the thousands of women who have suffered at the hands of this genocidal, terrorist group.
The security situation in DR Congo has worsened, even with the largest and most expensive UN peacekeeping mission of all times deployed there, because contrary to the stipulations of numerous regional and international agreements, Kinshasa has chosen to ally itself with FDLR and other militia groups for political and economic interests. I can imagine no greater shame than that of a government that not only fails to protect women and girls but also absolves, collaborates with, and arms the perpetrators of mass sexual violence.
In a past interview with The Guardian, former FDLR spokesman Lt. Col. Michel Habimana, alias Edmond Ngarambe, said: "This thing of rape – I can't deny that happens. We are human beings.”
For FDLR and its splinter groups, rape is a fact of life, a thing all men do and all women endure. The genocidal militia professes its desire to regain power in Rwanda. Since they once attempted to wipe out the entire Tutsi community in Rwanda, I do not doubt their resolve.
Today, as we observe the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, I hope that this particular and relentless threat that the Kinshasa-backed FDLR poses to women in our region is not overlooked. After all, one of the surest ways to end the reign of terror in eastern DR Congo is to cut off the oxygen for FDLR, the genocidal group whose heinous weaponization of sexual violence is not only well known but has also set the precedent and blueprint from which the other armed group shamelessly copycat.