Legacy
I’m sorry, but you have to read this story about the rape epidemic in D.R. Congo. Give your thanks to Leopold, Eisenhower, Dulles, Mobutu, and global disinterest in central Africa.
An important facet of the story is unfortunately left to Page 2, which many people probably won’t get to because Page 1 is not easy to read:
Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. “If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago,” said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.
Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo’s forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda’s genocide 13 years ago.
This, of course, further condemns the entire world in the abandonment of Rwanda, but the article doesn’t ask the larger question. How do we begin to account for populations who have been driven so far off the rails? Presumably widespread rape is not a cultural Hutu quality either, though it appears now to be amongst the Hutu militants.
Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon “reversed values” and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like eastern Congo.
But how can we isolate these events to the those horrific 100 days thirteen years ago? How can we leave out the chains of porters, the severed hands, the random heaped murders, and abducted women to ensure rubber quotas during the colonial period? How do we leave out the assassinations of elected leaders? The horror of Mobutus and Amins?
This is trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma. DR Congo is a country whose phenomenal natural resources have been stolen by so many hands (both foreign and domestic) that they use cargo planes designed in the 1960s. Planes that repeatedly crash into populated areas.
In the town of Shabunda, 70% of women reported being sexually assaulted. That’s reported. An honest question, how as a global group of people do we begin to account for that?
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