WUNRN
CONGO - GIRL, AGE 9. DETAILS
RAPE +
GENDER VIOLENCE & ABUSE RAMPANT
IN CONGO
August
11, 2009
By
Wayne Drash - CNN
The young girl on the right says she was
raped by Congolese soldiers. She was just 9 when it happened.
(CNN) -- The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school.
The young girl on the right says she was raped by Congolese soldiers. She was just 9 when it happened.
"These
two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the
bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who
spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year.
Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist,
traveled to the war-torn region of eastern Congo after being awarded the ShootQ
Grant, a $10,000 award to free photographers from everyday life to pursue a
project that raises awareness of an important global issue.
Borkgren pauses when she speaks of meeting the girl.
"She was obviously very traumatized to repeat this out loud, and I don't
think she had repeated it to anyone." The young girl lied to her about her
age when they first spoke.
"She said she was 15 when she was raped," Borkgren
says. "I figured she probably wanted to say she was 15 because it's more
acceptable than to say, 'I was 9 when they raped me.' "
The United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have
been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, when war broke out with Rwanda and
Uganda backing Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-Congo President Laurent
Kabila. Rape became a weapon of war, aid groups say.
"It is one of the worst places in the world to be a
woman or girl," says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human
Rights Watch who has spent the last 10 years focusing on Congo. "These are
often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a
strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to
humiliate them."
Most times, the women are raped by at least two perpetrators.
"Sometimes, that is done in front of the family, in front of the
children," Van Woudenberg says. She sighs, "What causes men to rape
-- I wish I had an answer to that."
Against this backdrop, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, one of the world's strongest voices for women's rights, traveled to
Congo as part of her whirlwind trip to Africa.
Clinton arrived in Goma in eastern Congo Tuesday where she is
to meet with rape victims during her visit. "I hope that here in the
[Congo] there will be a concerted effort to demand justice for women who are
violently attacked, and to make sure that their attackers are punished,"
Clinton said Monday after a tour of a Kinshasa hospital.
Human rights groups are eager to see if Clinton pressures
Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo and the son of Laurent Kabila, to do more to pursue
charges against top army commanders accused of rape.
"Soldiers have committed gang rapes, rapes leading to
injury and death, and abductions of girls and women," a report released
last month by Human Rights Watch says. "Their crimes are serious
violations of international humanitarian law. Commanders have frequently failed
to stop sexual violence and may themselves be guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity
as a consequence."
Van
Woudenberg says punishment, unfortunately, is all too rare for sex crimes.
"If you rape, you get away with it," she says.
According to the United Nations, there were 15,996 new cases
of sexual violence registered throughout Congo in 2008. Nearly two out of every
three rapes were carried out against children, most of them adolescent girls,
the Human Rights Watch report says.
A paltry 27 soldiers were convicted in military courts last
year. Under the current court system, the military handles accusations of rape against
its soldiers -- something aid groups say must be changed for real
accountability.
Since January of this year, aid organizations say there's
been a surge of violence against civilians as a result of Congolese operations
against Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are believed to have participated in
1994's Rwandan genocide. The fighting has left more than 1.8 million people
displaced in the volatile region, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees.
Aid groups have started to see an uptick of rapes of men this
year, although women and girls remain the primary targets. "The brutality
has increased on a huge scale," Van Woudenberg says.
She says she interviewed one 15-year-old girl who was held in
a hole for five months and gang-raped nearly every day. She had gone out
shopping when soldiers approached.
"They asked me to take off my clothes, and I did. There
wasn't much I could do," the girl told her. "They took me into the
bush. I stayed for five months with these people, and when I came back, I was
five months pregnant."
Van Woudenberg adds, "Gosh, the brutality against the
women and girls is unimaginable."
Congo has taken some measures to try to curb the sexual violence. In 2006, its
parliament passed a law criminalizing rape, with penalties ranging from five to
20 years. Penalties are doubled under certain circumstances, including
gang-rape and if the perpetrator is a public official. Kabila's wife, Olive
Lemba Kabila, has launched a public campaign speaking out against rapes of the
nation's women and girls.
The army has also started a zero-tolerance campaign in which
commanders have emphasized to troops that they must respect human rights and
protect civilians from harm, according to the U.N.
In May, the United Nations handed over the names of five top
military officers accused of rape. Two of the senior officers are now detained
in the capital of Kinshasa and the three others must report to authorities
under close observation. "It's expected that a trial could happen
soon," said U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi. "It certainly is a big
development. ... It's important. It's significant."
Still more must be done, aid groups say, starting with the
establishment of a special court made up of Congolese and international judges
and prosecutors to investigate rape allegations.
Borkgren, the photographer from Eugene, Oregon, says she went
to the Congo after having a dream in which two women yelled at her to
"come over here." She won the grant and traveled there for four
weeks, beginning in November of last year. She hitchhiked her way around the
country, something she now admits was "a little bit stupid."
She says she once came face-to-face with soldiers when she
was shopping at a market by herself. One of the men said he wanted to
"take me up to his camp." She still can't shake the looks of the
local women who were there.
"That was interesting," she says. "When the
soldiers were harassing me, the women looked ashamed of the soldiers. And when
they saw me tell them, 'No, go away,' the women looked at me quite
surprised."
Eventually, she found the girl who touched her heart --
"the great, great kid." Borkgren first spoke with her father, who was
initially reluctant to introduce her to his daughter. He explained that the
family had gone to authorities, only to be ignored.
Borkgren says that when she met the girl, they got along
instantly. At times, the young child didn't know how to describe what happened.
"She would say, 'I don't understand what it is, and I don't know what
words to use.' "
"It just turned my heart to think that here's this
little girl who doesn't even have the words to describe what happened to her,
and has to live her life having had this violence put upon her. Just this thoughtless
violence that she didn't deserve or ask for. It's so inhumane."
Her images capture a glimpse into that world, of savagery and lost innocence. The soldiers and rebels carrying out the rapes, she says, are misguided people who need help. Caught in the middle are the innocents: women, girls and fathers struggling to get justice.
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