Congo Rape Victims Seek Help, Justice

BARAKA, Congo — Nursing her year-old daughter under a tree, Zaina Kisa talks softly about how her life was destroyed when she was raped by 10 rebels from neighboring Burundi and conceived the child.

“There is no future here for a woman stigmatized by rape,” the 20-year-old woman said. “Many times I look at this child and remember the horror and pain of that day.... But she is a victim too because she will never know her father.”

Stories like Kisa’s are agonizingly common in eastern Congo, where the scale of suffering during five years of civil war is only now coming to light as the fighting ends.

Medical and aid workers say the extent of rapes is unusually large here for two reasons: Rape has been used as a weapon in both the political conflict and overlapping tribal fighting, and there is a widely believed folk myth in the region that sex with young virgins cures AIDS.

Rape has been used deliberately as a weapon, said Marie-Honorine Mwayuma Chiribagula of the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid group.

“There was systematic rape in villages. Armed men would go from house to house and systematically rape every female in a village. The fact that no one was punished and it was methodical shows that this was a deliberate policy,” she said.

Rick Brennan, the group’s health director, said rape was widely inflicted in recent civil conflicts from the Balkans to the West African nations of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, saw some of the worst.

Young girls and elderly women show up daily at hospitals and clinics in this part of eastern Congo to be treated for wounds inflicted by rapists. Attackers rarely face punishment by authorities struggling to keep control over the central African nation.

“Impunity bred this crisis,” said Maurice Bahati Mashekaga Namwira of Inheritors of Justice, a Pentecostal human rights group. “People raped with gusto, and there was no one to hold them to account.”

After the war broke out in 1998, thousands of women are believed to have been assaulted by rebels, soldiers and tribal fighters seeking to destroy communities that supported their rivals. In the largely traditional societies of eastern Congo, wives who are raped almost always are rejected by their husbands.

Now HIV-positive civilian men are committing rape, believing the tales spread by traditional healers that rape is an AIDS cure.

That superstition may have been the reason that Mapendo Magamba’s 4-year-old daughter was raped in Bukavu, the provincial capital a little over 125 miles north of Baraka.

Magamba trembles with rage as she describes her child returning from an errand and sobbing that a neighbor had “hurt her.” An elder sister called for help from other neighbors, who examined the child and discovered her thighs covered with semen and blood.

The child was treated at Bukavu’s Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Josee Mwiyaso Yangoy, a gynecologist, said the onslaught of rapes was only now coming to light because long-closed roads were opening, allowing thousands of women from isolated villages to seek treatment.

“Some come with knife and gunshot wounds in the vagina, others with large sticks shoved into their genitals and others with broken limbs after they are beaten to submission,” she said.

“Even pregnant women are not spared; they are gang-raped until unborn babies die,” Yangoy said.

Of the dozens of rape victims she has treated, Yangoy estimated that 3% were infected with the AIDS virus and 40% with other sexually transmitted diseases. There is no sure way to tell whether a woman was infected as a result of rape.

Most of the programs that treat rape victims are paid for by international aid groups like the International Rescue Committee.

Aid workers involved in the programs estimate that for every rape that is reported, 30 are not.

Officials in Bukavu insist that they are trying to prosecute rapists. The deputy provincial governor, Jean-Pierre Mazambi, said at least 20 former rebel fighters had been convicted and jailed for rape.

But that hasn’t deterred many rapists, Yangoy said.

The situation is complicated by the fact that some of the culprits -- thousands of rebels from Rwanda and Burundi -- are operating from bases in eastern Congo and remain beyond the reach of Congolese authorities.

Hamunazo Musoke was one of their victims.

When Rwandan insurgents first attacked the Congo town of Shabunda a year ago, they raped Musoke and her mother-in-law, and forced their husbands to watch, she says.

Musoke’s marriage survived that attack, but her husband kicked her out after she was raped again six months later.