“Imagine you are a woman making dinner for your family when a militia group barges into your home and says they are going to rape you in front of your husband and children,” said guest speaker Carrie Crawford in a lecture that was part of Women’s History Month.
“Imagine you are the husband and the militia says that if you try and stop them they will kill you and your whole family,” she said. “That is what has been happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the past 20 years as neighboring countries have come to steal the wealth of natural resources found there.”
Many people know about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda thanks to the Oscar nominated film “Hotel Rwanda” released in 2004 starring Don Cheadle. Many people also know about the genocide that took place in Darfur, Sudan in 2003 thanks to actor/director George Clooney’s publicity of it.
The 24-year war in Uganda led by the Lord Resistance Army’s (LRA) leader Joseph Kony, who has been kidnapping children to turn boys into soldiers and girls into sex slaves has gone viral with the Invisible Children video “Kony 2012” calling for his arrest for crimes against humanity.
The Congo, however, has largely been ignored.
“Congo sits in the heart of Africa. It is the heart of Africa,” Crawford said. It is a land rich in beauty and resources.
It is also the country with the highest numbers of rapes and violence against women.
According to Crawford, there are an estimated 21 armed groups operating in the DRC, and on any given day in the east, armed groups of around five men will come bursting into homes and rape women and young girls, sometimes mutilating them or kidnapping them to use as sex slaves.
This kind of violence has been described as a kind of biological warfare that is inexpensive and has little danger to the attackers.
These Rapes with Extreme Violence, or REVs, are designed to rob women of their humanity by mutilating their genitals, purposely infecting them with STDs and HIV, or trying to impregnate women in an attempt at ethnic cleansing to make sure Congolese women only have babies by non-Congolese men.
REVs are weapons of mass terror meant to demoralize, displace and terrorize whole communities.
Hutu militia groups who fled Rwanda after the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) gained control of the capitol and country during the 1994 conflict were pursued by the RPF who invaded Congo to fight the Hutus.
Rwanda’s civil war is being fought on the backs of Congolese women who have paid for it with their bodies.
Joseph Kony and his LRA have also invaded Congo and committed the same crimes of humanity against Congolese women and children they committed in their own country of Uganda.
Why are Congo’s neighbors invading, terrorizing and dehumanizing the people of the Congo? It is because the Democratic Republic of Congo is rich in natural resources like gold, silver, copper, diamonds and coltan, a heat resistant mineral used in many electronic devices like cell phones, computers and electronic devices.
For the people responsible for the estimated 1,100 rapes a month, there are no consequences.
There have been over 400,000 rapes in the past 20 years and over 6 million Congolese who have been killed by militia groups from neighboring countries like Rwanda and Uganda.
EMU student Olivia Mateso Mbala-Nkanga said, “There are not enough people who know about what’s going on in the Congo.”
Director of Diversity for EMU’s student government, Mbala-Nkanga knows first-hand what is going on in the Congo because she
is Congolese and lived there in the ’90s as a child.
Her father left Congo in 1998 for a job at the University of Michigan, but it would be two years before family members were able to smuggle Mbala-Nkanga out of the country with her mother and siblings during a cease-fire in 2000. They traveled to the United Sates, where they were reunited with her father.
Mbala-Nkanga is studying international affairs and hopes to help bring about change in the Congo.
She said she cannot live her life in peace and freedom in the United States knowing what has been happening in Congo.
“I would feel so guilty if I did nothing to help the people of Congo,” Mbala-Nkanga said.
She explained that unlike the civil wars of Uganda and Rwanda, the war in Congo is not a civil war, but an invasion and an
overflow of conflicts of neighboring countries into the Congo that are terrorizing the people of Congo.
According to Crawford, “A solution has not been found because no one is listening to the Congolese.”
