The ‘man who repairs women’ on rape as a weapon and how the world forgot the Democratic Republic of Congo

livus, 15 days ago

From the article:

Known as the “man who repairs women”, Mukwege, 69, has treated more than 80,000 survivors of sexual violence by armed groups at Panzi hospital, which he founded in Bukavu, South Kivu, in 1999. In 2018, along with the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his work, which he dedicated to sexual violence survivors across the world.

In his Nobel lecture, he talked about the first patients admitted to the hospital. One had been raped and shot in her genitals; another was an 18-month-old baby horrifically injured by rape.

“The macabre violence knew no limit,” he said at the time. That violence has never stopped. Every day, between five and seven new survivors of rape come through the doors of the hospital.

Médecins Sans Frontières said last year that it was treating 48 people a day after a surge in cases of sexual violence around Goma. Photograph: Marion Molinari/MSF

“Raping a woman, raping the children and hurting them, and showing it to the community, is a way of traumatising [everyone],” says Mukwege, who, with Murad, set up the Global Survivors Fund to provide reparations for victims...

DRC has experienced three decades of conflict, with militias >and groups of bandits emerging from two civil wars fought between 1996 and 2003. The east of the country has borne the brunt of the fighting. More than 100 armed groups now operate there.

Among them is a resurgent M23, which the UN says is backed by neighbouring Rwanda, a claim Kigali denies. Since 2021, about 1.7 million people have fled fighting linked to the group in North Kivu, and hundreds of thousands of people are living in overcrowded camps in Goma and the surrounding area.

Mukwege has been critical of the Congolese government’s response to the fighting, denouncing its impunity over war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the “plundering of [the country’s] natural resources”. His comments have brought him enemies and he narrowly survived an assassination attempt in 2012. For a time he was under UN protection, but that ended in 2020.

In December, he ran in the presidential election. “I wanted to take my responsibility before history,” he says. “And we tried to offer an alternative vision to say that there is no fatality, that there is the possibility of changing things.”

Mukwege took about 1% of the vote and the incumbent, Felix Tshisekedi, won a second term in office in a vote that nine opposition candidates condemned as a “sham”.

livus, 15 days ago

He wants the international community to ditch “double >standards” in prioritising the crises in Ukraine and Gaza over that of the DRC.

“We’re experiencing almost the same tragedy as those taking place in the Middle East and Ukraine, but nobody is talking about the DRC, or very little,” he says.

Despite this, Mukwege retains his optimism and will continue to fight for those who suffer.

“I have hope,” he says, “because I am convinced that the victims who are suffering today will be able to take their destiny into their own hands and put an end to all the injustices we are experiencing here.”..