Political Rights
the Child
Children
Charter on People’s Rights with Regard
Rights in Africa
praising God
The cries of the women in a tiny hospital are as harrowing as they are
haunting. I will never forget what I felt when I walked into a hospital room
filled with the walking wounded in the town of Bukavu in Eastern Congo.
“This a pain worse than death,” says 28-year-old Henriette Nyota. She’s
one of hundreds of women who’ve sought treatment at Panzi Hospital for a crime
that continues to be committed here on an almost daily basis — multiple rapes
by men in uniform with the intention, aid workers say, of destroying their
child-bearing capabilities.
The story is as complicated as the Congo itself. The men in
uniform are members of Congo’s recently integrated army. Some of the men are
from one ethnic group and they’re raping and mutilating women from a different
ethnic group in ways that can only be described as barbaric and medieval. After
all, this is peacetime Congo. The civil war that killed more than three million
people ended nearly three years ago. This isn’t supposed to be happening today.
“These animals insert knives and other sharp objects into the women
after raping them continuously for days at a time,” says Dr. Denis Mukwege
Mukengere, the lone physician working here. He’s just finished a six-hour
operation to repair one woman’s uterus. She’d walked 300 miles to get here,
exhausted, traumatized and overcome with excruciating pain.
“They seem
to do this to prevent another generation of warriors from being born,” Dr.
Mukengere tells us.
He takes us on a tour of his hospital. Outside, in
the corridors, new arrivals have just been dropped off by a Good Samaritan. I
count a dozen of them, some with infant children, others too old to have
children, all victims of unimaginable atrocities. He counsels them in his slow,
methodical way and asks his small army of nurses to assist them. He’s a kind of
Mother Teresa, a person who has come to help the helpless. This hospital has
become a haven for Congo’s suffering masses, an oasis surrounded by horror and
hatred.
We enter one of six wards dedicated to victims of sexual
violence. Dr. Mukengere introduces us to 19-year-old Helene Wamunzila. She first
came here five years ago after being raped repeatedly. Dr. Mukengere was able to
stitch her back together and eventually discharged her. He says she cried the
day she left, pleading with him to let her stay here because she said the
evildoers were waiting for her back in her village. He didn’t listen then and
now regrets his decision. She’s returned, badly mutilated physically and
permanently scarred psychologically.
“I wish I’d let her stay,” he says,
shaking his head.
Victims of these horrible atrocities lie helplessly in
bed, colostomy bags hanging below. Hanging over their heads is the fear that not
only might they not be able to have children, but that they may have contracted
HIV/AIDS, an almost guaranteed death sentence in this part of the world.
“Four out of 10 end up being HIV positive,” Dr. Mukengere tells us.
“It’s almost as though God is punishing these people in the worst possible
way.”
Rose Mujikandi, 24, tells us 14 men broke into her parents’ house
two months ago. She says they killed her father and mother, two brothers and
infant sister, but not before they had their way with her.
“It’s the
last thing my father and mother saw before they were killed. Can you imagine
living the rest of my life knowing this is the image they went to heaven with?”
she asks, tears streaming down her face. “But I have faith in God. What happened
to me happened for a reason,” she concludes.
In an open-air recreation area, more women, hundreds of them, talk
quietly among themselves. They see Dr. Mukengere and one of them breaks into
song. The others follow, but some are too traumatized to think of singing. The
song is as haunting as it is defiant. I ask the doctor what it means.
“They’re telling the men that they will never be broken, that their
spirits will never be broken,” he says.
The song ends and I turn to one
of the women. She’s using a cane to walk because of the damage she’s received
from days of multiple rapes and mutilation. She gives me her name only as Tintsi
and says she’s 21 years old. She was brought here by her relatives on a
stretcher for a short distance, she says, only 25 miles. She tells me she was
gang-raped by 15 men for eight days and eight nights. She just recently began
walking again and the cane helps her get around.
“They can destroy my
womanhood,” she says, “but they can never destroy my spirit.”
I ask her
where she gets her strength and I almost know what she will say before the words
leave her mouth.
“God,” she whispers. Then, as if for emphasis, she
cries aloud, “Only God can save the women of Congo.” The women around her
applaud. Some shake their heads in agreement. Others simply stare straight
ahead.
I turn to Dr. Mukengere and ask him why everyone here refers to
God after being the victims of such atrocities.
“God is the only thing
they can hold on to that no one can take away from them. They’ve lost their
dignity. They’ve lost their womanhood. They have nothing left,” he says. “But if
you ask me, God forgot about Congo a long time ago.”
I wonder if he
believes this. If he did, would he be here doing what he’s been doing every day
for the past three years?
I turn to leave this place and can’t help
feeling sick to my stomach. Every time I feel things are getting better on this
continent that I grew up in, this land I proudly call my home, this place that
has so much to offer, I’m confronted with the stark reality that all is not well
in the place many people proudly call “Mother Africa.”
We need to do
more. We need to take care of our mothers, our sisters, our daughters and our
grandmothers. Most of all we need to make life better for the generations that
are yet to come.
We’ll have to start somewhere, and the Congo it seems,
is as good a place as any.
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