Stopping Sexual Violence in Congo: Some Realism with Our Rhetoric

by Brooks Keene

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published December 11, 2008 @ 03:20AM PT

Michael's post on sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo) on Tuesday made me reflect on my own trip to eastern Congo and the feelings I had when I left.  I wasn't in the epicenter of the sexual violence, but as I flew out of Kasongo, Maniema province in a small plane over the vast swaths of achingly beautiful mountainous jungle, I knew that what I had heard and seen had hammered into my brain that this was not a problem for which there were any easy fixes.

Photo by Brooks Keene taken between Kasongo and Goma in DRC.

Before we can talk about stopping fighting in Congo or ending impunity for rapists, there's a lot of work to be done--perhaps generations of it.  I'm writing this, not to dissuade you from taking action and signing on to the petitions and actions that Michael pointed to, but to make sure that we understand the long road ahead and the urgent need to get started quickly.

There are two major categories of barriers on the issue of violence against women in Congo that we all need to keep in mind.

1. Issues related to Congo itself: I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that Congo today is less developed than the United States was during the Civil War, and it's as big as the U.S. east of the Mississippi.  The road infrastructure alone (or rather lack of it) is enough to keep any police or peacekeeping force from meaningfully enforcing any law in huge sections of the country.  When I interviewed a MONUC official in Kasongo, one woman had just walked for three weeks to inform the head of office that every woman in her village had been raped by a militia.  By this time of course, MONUC could basically do nothing since the perpetrators were long gone.  Whether you're a humanitarian organization or the Congolese government, if you can't get somewhere, you can't do much there.  And if you do get somewhere, you paid a lot of money for your trip.  Maybe this gives you some idea of the transport options, but all the other systems are just as bad or worse.
2. Issues related to sexual violence: Sexual violence is ultimately about culture change and does not lend itself to quick and easy solutions.  People in Congo told me that sexual violence happened before war broke out, but never at the scale seen during the war.  This also happened in Kenya this year during the post-election violence.  Rapes, gang rapes and forced circumcisions became a tool for hurting and humiliating opposing tribes.  A friend of mine who went to the hospital in Nairobi told me that so many women who'd been raped came in that they were having to share beds.  Conflict was the impetus for scaling up, but there are prevailing norms associated with people's ideas of masculinity in Congo (or in Kenya and many other places) that make it ripe for mass sexual violence.  It is these ideas of masculinity that lead to sexual violence being used as a tool of humiliation to subdue and break apart families and whole communities.  Congo just happens to have all the other ingredients such as abundant minerals that pay for guns on the international market and that lead to almost total breakdown.

We need to have some humility and realize that it's going to be hard to actually reach people, much less change social norms and overhaul Congo's judicial system.  Perhaps nothing points so well to the challenges as today's article in the New York Times describing a massacre of 150 people in Kiwanja that happened less than mile from where the UN mission was located.  So where to start?  The petitions Michael pointed to in the other post are great.  In particular, I think the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) is a great initiative.  Experts in the field have told me that we really need a strategic thinking process for humanitarian work related to sexual violence to identify meaningful indicators we want to improve and think about how to do that before we pour a bunch of money into it.  IVAWA would give U.S. aid agencies space to do this.

The other place we might start is in looking at some of the ways we and other international actors feed the insecurity in Congo.  Where are we getting the coltan for our cell phones?  How do AK-47s and ample bullets make it into a place where it's hard to get clean water?  How can the U.S. help mobilize support for under-funded UN peacekeeping, which various independent research has shown is a good value for the money?

The problems are as numerous as the stars, but before we throw our hands up in dispair and pass off Congo as a perpetual war zone, let's take a second, breathe and get to work.  We might not actually be able to stop rape in the Congo anytime soon, but let's figure out what we can do, bite off our little chunk and start chewing.