The United Nations official dealing with conflict-related sexual violence welcomed the Security Council’s imposition of sanctions on two armed groups active in the eastern DRC – the Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda and the 23 March Movement.
The International Criminal Court today issued an arrest warrant for Sylvestre Mudacumura, the head of a Rwandan rebel group, as well as a second arrest warrant for Congolese rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda, for alleged war crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
February saw the trial of 11 men before the Democratic Republic of Congo’s pioneering “mobile gender court”. The men were accused of raping more than 60 women in Fizi, South Kivu province. In February, the “City of Joy” also had its official opening. The compound will serve as a campus where Congolese women, most of them rape victims, will be groomed to become leaders in their communities in the hope that they will catalyze social change.
The New York Times reported that the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or F.D.L.R., gang-raped at least 150 women in July and August during a weekend raid on a community of villages in eastern Congo, according to United Nations and other humanitarian officials.
Eve Ensler writes a searing piece about the continuing atrocities of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she has been visiting the month of December. She concludes, “Over twelve years, this war, this brutally inconceivable violence has raged on. Almost six million dead. Almost 500 thousand raped. You tell the story of horror and atrocity one too many times and then you realize nothing is changing and that the world goes on getting its minerals, supporting its luxuries and the death, massacres, rapes and tortures of millions do not matter.”
On 24 November 2009, the Prosecution opened its case against Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui at the International Criminal Court. Both men stand accused of crimes of sexual violence. The trial is the second before the ICC and, along with the trial of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the second concerning the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
CNN reports on the escalating rape of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Anneke van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch said 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Eastern Congo since 1998, and the condition of women has become more dire as the Congolese army has pressed a military campaign against armed groups in the countryside.
On the heels of a Washington Post report describing the worsening epidemic of rape in the Congo during a U.S.-Backed military operation, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited eastern Congo and unveiled a $17 million plan to fight Congo’s stunning levels of sexual violence.
In “Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims”, Jeffrey Gettleman reports on the increasing incidence of male rape victims in the Congo.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is to report to the Security Council on the implementation of Resolution 1820. What will we learn? A year after adopting the resolution, Congo remains the worst place on the planet to be a woman. Over 12 years, in a regional economic war for resources, hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured, their bodies destroyed by unimaginable acts. The Security Council’s implementation of Resolution 1820 in Congo — the very place that inspired it — has been an utter failure.
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