BUKAVU, Democratic Republic of Congo — Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen in the country. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.
"The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world," said John Holmes, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs. "The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity - it's appalling."
The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over.
Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo's wars and rebellions and its tradition of bad government. But the elections have not unified the country or significantly strengthened the government's hand to deal with renegade forces, many from outside the country.
The justice system and the military still barely function, and U.N. officials say government troops are among the worst offenders when it comes to rape. Large areas of the country, especially in the east, remain authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.
According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys, and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.
U.N. officials said the Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias that fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty.
Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.
"I'm weak, I'm angry, and I don't know how to restart my life," she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors freed her.
She is also pregnant.
While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo's problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.
"It's gone beyond the conflict," said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become "almost normal."
Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year.
At Panzi Hospital, where Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.
"I still have pain and feel chills," said Kasindi Wabulasa, who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband's chest and madehim watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes they would shoot him. When they were finished, she said, they shot him anyway.
In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and the other riches that can be extracted from Congo's abused soil.
The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest U.N.peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops. But U.N. peacekeepers seem to be stepping up efforts to protect women. Recently, they initiated what they call "night flashes," in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers arethere. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.
Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is being built specifically for rape victims, the hospital sends women back to their villages before they have fully recovered because it needs space for the never-ending stream of new arrivals.
Front Section, Pages 13 on 10/07/2007