For the first time this year’s award deals with gender based violence, the most appalling crime against humanity. It is a strong voice condemning rape and other sexual assaults of women particularly as a weapon in military conflict and war. This unspeakably terrible brutality is often systematically used to threaten innocent people and to break the will of resistance of a whole population. Until now unlike other offenses this crime is usually belittled or covered up –the perpetrators get away with impunity, because the victims are just only women and girls…

Therefore the most prestigious award being given to Dr. Denis Mukwege from DR Congo and Nadia Murak from Irak marks a turning point in public awareness and sensibilization. Nadja from the Ezidis minority had been brutally raped and enslaved by the IS terrorists. After her escape as a victimized person she had courageously broken a wide-spread taboo:

Instead of keeping shamefully silent she spoke openly about her unbearable physical and psychological suffering. She accused the perpetrators as criminals to be brought to court for trial. Nadja Murak also strongly pleaded for reintegrating the women and girls within their own community and helping them to get again their self-confidence.

For IAW this award means an important step into the right direction, because the fight against sexual violence on women and girls is one of its most important global goals. Many IAW member organizations face these problems and are adopting strategies to stop these crimes.

But foremost in DR Congo the female population is exposed to these blatantly cruel excesses. For the public seminar in Berlin Anuarite Siirewabo, living in Buvaku DR Congo and coordinator of SOFEDEC, had sent a video-message. She gave a clear and moving description about the life of victims of rape, view her written original speech in French on the IAW-Website and the English summary here.

All of us present in Berlin will not forget Anuarite’s appeal:

“..The work of SOFEDEC is to help these women to forget the consequences of the war, and what they endured. We need funds for them and for the children born after these horrors. It is difficult to speak of all those women who have been raped, who died in the war. There are wounds deep in our hearts…”

 Here Anuarite reports about a brutal incident on February 13^th 2013: While she was at one of their hot-spots in Bisisi (Kalonge) she heard that two women were kept imprisoned and had to endure rape, beatings and torture in a house occupied by armed men. Anuarite having decided to go there, encountered some shepherds and the village-chief. They all warned her of the extreme risks of approaching that place. Despite of that Anuarite went on and got in touch with the chief of the armed groups. As a deal they just wanted a few drinks plus a goat. When Anuarite had fulfilled their demands, both women were released. Then Anuarite asked both husbands to accept the victims again as their spouses instead of abandoning them. Anuarite reassured them about the recovery of their wives after having been medically treated. Then Anuarite brought both women to the Panzi Hospital where Dr. Mukwege  “repaired” them. Today one former victim age 32 is the mother of several children, and the other aged 47 also leads a happy life.

Actually Dr. Mukwege and his team not only provide physical treatment but also psychological help after traumatic experiences. Anuarite and the SOFEDEC members visit the women later on in their homes and try to help them to be accepted again as full members of their families, a difficult job in a country, where rape victims are often ostracized!

No wonder that Anuarite was very happy, when she heard about the Nobel prize of Peace being awarded to Dr. Mukwege! In fact he upholds similar life-goals like Anuarite, which is helping the victims of rape, fighting against impunity of the perpetrators and preventing sexual violence.

Dr. Mukwege in his official speech as Nobel prize winner addresses all of us:

“It is a choice:

– whether or not we stop violence against women,
– whether or not we create a positive masculinity which promotes gender equality,
in times of peace and in times of war.

Taking action means saying ‘no’ to indifference…After twenty years of bloodshed, rape and massive population displacements, the Congolese people are desperately awaiting implementation of the responsibility to protect the civilian population when their government cannot or does not want to do so. The people are waiting to explore the path to a lasting peace…”

Also Anuarite voices the same concerns

“The women of SOFEDEC, Solidarity of women for Development, Environment and Children’s Rights in DRC sound the alarm. They ask for your attention. The support they look for is nowhere else but in your actions, your donations and your strengthening of their capacity to subsist and to resist all the violence they have been victims of…Those brave women are busy looking for a living in their own country, not somewhere else. They are courageous, they do not shrink back, nor give room to fear….”

 There were national elections on December 30, 2018 in DR Congo. Anuarite hopes that under the new opposition president Felix Chisekedi there will be some positive changes. Actually also Anuarite was a candidate in her home-prefecture, but she realized that generally women were not elected in large numbers. Anuarite points out that they are lacking the necessary resources for raising awareness about their issues during the election campaigns. One of the problems is also the poverty of women. Therefore women don’t have easy access to power. Nevertheless Anuarite feels that the Congolese women are strong and tenacious and will never abandon their goal halfway through.

The post Nobel Prize for Peace 2018 – Hope for raped women and girls in DR Congo appeared first on International Alliance of Women.

There have been rapes equally brutal which have gone unnoticed or unpunished simply because they took place in the rural heartlands of the country where the people involved were too poor to protest. Children are raped, babies are raped, old women are raped and the word becomes a joke in the mouths of politicians.

The problem is the objectification of women and an underlying belief that they can be used as battering rams. In a country where daughters are destroyed, gender violence is a part of everyday life, a woman on her own is fair game to a patriarchal society, or even, as in the Nirbhaya case, a woman out in the evening with her boyfriend.  In the Nirbhaya case, the woman clung onto life demanding that her rapists be burned alive for destroying her life. Others have not been so fortunate – their violators have done an efficient job of killing them after the rape and disappearing into the night.

Where the criminals have been caught, courts have shown a vacillation in the sentencing. In February 2014, for example, even after the Nirbhaya case, Justices B S Chauhan and M Y Eqbal found a man guilty of raping his friend’s daughter and strangling her afterwards. Despite the fact that the girl called the rapist uncle, he was given 35 years in prison instead of the death penalty. In February 1999, a culprit was reprieved because his act was not intentional – he had found a minor girl on her own at night, raped her and in gagging her, caused her death. An Allahabad caught sentenced the man to death but a bench of Justices set it aside saying that it was not that rarest of rare cases which deserved death. In December of that year a four-year-old was kidnapped, assaulted and murdered – her rapist too went free because there were inconsistencies in the evidence. The Supreme Court in Haryana commented that for the most part decisions were judge-centric rather than principle based.

Over two decades, this indecisiveness has only served to strengthen the feeling that India’s women of a certain class are of no relevance. Two-year-olds, five-year-olds are all disposable in the scheme of things and pathetic bodies stuffed in gunnysacks are forgotten in a world obsessed for the most part with survival.  A spiritual leader Baba Asaram, also incidentally accused of rape, commented that Nirbhaya was as guilty as her rapists and should have called them her brothers and recited mantras to them. Another extreme Hindu Right supremo claimed that rapes occurred only in cities because women wore ‘less clothes’. While a third said broadly ‘boys will be boys’.

Has the Nirbhaya verdict changed anything for India’s women? Hardly. An eight-year-old was raped a week after the Supreme Court sentence in a recently inaugurated school in Patna. Nirbhaya is an ‘ideal’ that no one will apply to the rest unless India’s prominent women continue to protest publicly and vociferously – and even then the outcry will not touch the backwaters. God, a woman said, sees the truth and waits.

Anjana Basu

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Before the independence of the Democratic Republic of Congo DRC (before 1960), women’s status must  be viewed in the context of colonized peoples, that is to say, of people enjoying limited rights. Women in Belgian Congo did not enjoy the same rights as women in the so-called civilized and independent countries. Access to education and the right to health were not fully guaranteed. Maternal and infant mortality were high. Women were living in poverty and marginalization. Congolese women were largely rural and in that context, they were undergoing customary traditions, which generally were not in favour of their development.

From 1960 to 1990 the situation of the Congolese woman advanced in some respects. Many women had access to education. Women were no longer predominantly rural but became urban, with access to information, training and employment.  Yet, as the period was characterized by a dictatorial regime that impoverished the nation, women did not escape  poverty, which brought the growth of antivalues such as prostitution and promiscuity into the female circle, and these were used to the  delight  of political leaders. In short, the woman of that time was reified in spite of the various programs in her favour, like the program on the empowerment of the Congolese woman, but she  was  mostly used for political gains.

After the 90s, marked by the launch of the democratization process, Congolese women, like all sections of the population, took advantage of this momentum to claim their rights.  Thus gradually, women’s  organizations emerged distinguishing  themselves in areas that were once reserved for men such as politics, the military, the national police, the judiciary and the Bar.

Since 2007 during the release by the AFDL of Mzee Laurent Desire Kabila, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been immersed in a relentless war especially in the eastern part of the country where there are numerous armed groups, who violate, kill and enlist children in their armed groups.  This is in addition to the violence perpetrated against women, which is becoming a common practice in the country. Those last few years many women and children have been violated in the provinces of South Kivu, North Kivu and Katanga by the militias of Maimai Rai Mutomboki the Bakatakatanga  and the FNALU in the province of North-kivu. It is in this framework that the NGO SOFEDEC, fights with all means at their disposal against all forms of rapes and violence against women.

In recent years, the issue of gender-related violence has increasingly become part of the psyche of the States, of civil society and of international justice institutions. In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defined rape (which is a form of sexual violence) in conflicts as a war crime and recognized other forms of sexual violence as individual crimes that can be prosecuted. The majority of perpetrators are men. Women and girls are often the main victims and the survivors of sexual violence since, in case of conflict and crisis, violence against women increases and women and girls are then considered, as “property” and “instruments of war”. The violence perpetuated against them serves to humiliate, degrade and split the family and community ties, which reduces their ability to deal with the opposite side.  Rape is one of the most common forms of sexual violence as a weapon of war, whereas genital mutilation, sexual slavery by abduction or ” forced marriage”, forced pregnancy and sterilization are used to dominate women and, by extension, their communities.

The patriarchal structure encourages and supports insidious manifestations of tradition, culture and socialization of women and men based on gender norms and stereotypes. This structure creates a vision of justice that allows some types of   violence to be considered acceptable or even natural. Gender norms based on a patriarchal system that separates the male and the female, the public sector and the private sector, collective rights and individual rights encourage the notion that women are considered to be the property of men, and their place to be at home, away from the political, social and economic spaces. It is also interesting to note that in times of conflict, of repression or political upheaval, men and women – especially women human rights defenders (WHRDs) – are exposed to sexual violence.

Impunity for sexual violence during and after conflicts is widespread. The fight against sexual violence in conflict requires that states and non-state actors be held accountable for their actions. The programs of the United Nations Security Council and CEDAW, on Women, Peace and Security, as well as certain regional plans and local action, some state policies and other legislations support multiple attempts to end sexual violence. By the principle of “due diligence”, States are obliged to protect and fight against sexual violence, prosecute the perpetrators and provide relief and support to survivors. State actors and non-state actors can be prosecuted under some national laws and regional mechanisms if they exist, according to the International Criminal Court and the principles of CEDAW. International mechanisms such as Resolution 1325 of the UN Security Council advocate and support the inclusion of women’s perspectives in participation processes and organizations during and after conflicts including, when it comes to conflict prevention, peace processes and transitions, missions and envoys responsible for the maintenance of peace and, at the end of conflicts, decision-making bodies such as local councils, national offices, and so on. That said, the root causes of potential conflicts, which are often of an economic and social nature must be addressed holistically, with more emphasis on a culture of peace, of demilitarization, of gender equality and strengthening of economic and social rights for all.

In history, war was considered as a general melee in which the civilians ran the risk of being hurt and where men and boys, who are the main fighters think that they  have rights over all they can dominate as if they were paying tribute to their masculinity by making war. This serves to justify sexual violence against women, children and men.

Why so? Because rape and other forms of sexual violence used during conflicts are ways to control and destroy enemies. However, we must recognize that sexual violence also occurs during relatively peaceful periods

Thus we solicit the support necessary for the financing of the above project as well as a support for the realization of an in-depth study relating to this reflection and the subsequent support for the development of a code of protection and promotion of Congolese women, built up by bringing together the legal arsenal on issues relating to women’s rights and their relationships with the society in the DRC (Family Code, the law on sexual violence, Treaties, resolutions and international agreements on women’s human rights not yet ratified, etc.).

Women’s situation in the DRC remains a major concern. Still, up to now instances can be seen of  houses being burnt down in villages, mass rape of women, men taken by force or as hostages and forced to work, looting and theft of cattle, appalled and overwhelmed children in the bush, people killed, thousands of people including women children and elderly people displaced, massacres, massive violations of human rights, the recruitment of children in  armed groups, abductions , sexual slavery of  women and children, children born from rape abandoned and in great difficulty at school, destruction of social infrastructure (couples, schools, hospitals, etc.).

This brief analysis of the situation of Congolese women from the colonial times up to now makes us realize the progressive degradation of the dignity of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

All these tumults, political crises, armed conflicts and successive wars have had an unfortunate impact on the humanitarian, economic, social and psychological situation of

Congolese women and even of their children, hence the need, for the Democratic Republic of Congo, to promote conditions of peace and security, especially in its Eastern part which is often the trigger point of clashes.

For SOFEDEC / DRCongo
Coordinator of SOFEDEC: SIIREWABO MUYUWA Anuarite

Solidarité des femmes pour le development, environnement et droits de l’enfant au Congo

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