In a remote corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s war-torn province of North Kivu, rape was an everyday reality for the women. But they couldn’t hide in their homes, their families’ survival depended on water, and there were no taps or pumps for miles. It was only when thirst began to tear at their family’s throats that the women would venture out at night, weak from having endured days without water.
They knew what waited for them in the darkness. Hundreds of women had been raped in Beni, a town of 170,000, poised at the edge of the Ituri Forest, in northeastern Congo. It was a ten-hour walk to the nearest tap, which let out only a trickle of water. The women had to wait all night to fill their pots. They were the perfect targets for soldiers looking to satisfy themselves.
But these aren’t ordinary soldiers on the payroll of a regular army. They are combatants roaming the countryside with weapons, serving under Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Rwandan general who has taught them that brutality is their only means of survival.
A UN report explains: “During the first six months of 2008, there were more than 5,000 reported rape cases in the flashpoint province of North Kivu, according to data collected by doctors at health centers. The true figure is likely to be far higher, as women are too traumatized or afraid of stigma to seek help.”
By 2005 everyone had a neighbor, sister, mother or daughter who had been raped. In some cases, the women never returned. What choice did they have? Their families needed water. So they braved the darkness. If they weren’t ambushed on the way to the water tap, the women listened fearfully for predatory footsteps while they waited for the six hours it took to fill their vessels. It was always the same story. The man wore some sort of army uniform and he wouldn’t listen to any amount of pleading. There was only one variation: Sometimes there were up to 15 men to one woman. Why should they worry? They served under generals who made no secret of the sexual slaves they brutalized. Who was going to hold them accountable?
It was in that environment that Francois Bellet began to work on a project for French NGO Solidarities to install 84 water taps to provide water to 170,000 people in the area. They had no problem finding diggers so that they could begin to lay pipelines: The women had a special interest in ensuring safe access to water.
“The change was incredible. (Now that) Solidarities ensured a safe supply of water (starting 2005), there are no rapes in Beni. There is a direct correlation between access to water and rape in Congo,” said Bellet, who now works for UNICEF.
But Bellet’s job description does not include policing pillaging soldiers in Congo, it is ensuring that the population has access to safe water and sanitation. Bellet would like nothing better than to concentrate on ensuring a safe water supply in his designated area, but the reality of working in Congo makes it difficult to disentangle one’s duties from the human rights abuses caused by the conflict.
Whose job is it to reign in the rape epidemic? Experts say that dismantling rebel militias that fight for control of large swaths of Congo’s mineral rich land is the key. This is no easy task. In many cases the government has no control of the areas in question.
A new constitution adopted in 2006 clarified definitions of rape and sexual attacks, and introduced a 20-year minimum sentence for those found guilty. But few women have the money to prosecute, and experts say the judicial system is too riddled with corruption to effectively stamp out the culture of impunity.
According to an officer on the UN Human Rights desk in Lubumbashi, “In some cases the local law enforcers want to make an arrest, but they don’t even have a vehicle with which to drive to the perpetrator of the crime and arrest him, we have seen instances where the police may borrow the car from the victim and ask for cash for fuel.”
Dr. Roger Luhiriri is particularly concerned about the age of the rape victims he found himself caring for at Panzi hospital. “The number of women raped has been rising but also the age of the females raped is going down, the girls are sometimes five year old, sometimes seven…” he said, echoing a Human Rights Watch report where the youngest rape victim they documented was a three year old girl.
“The women have vaginal tears or fistulas which means they leak urine, so their husbands and fathers often don’t want them back,” said Luhiriri.
“The women almost always say the men who raped them spoke a foreign language,” he said, which is another way of saying the victims say their torturers are mostly Rwandan soldiers.
