Nairobi Notebook

Rape: A Weapon of War

Yesterday the UN declared that it deemed rape to be a war tactic, a deliberate weapon to humiliate and break the will of communities. Russia, China, Indonesia and Vietnam all expressed reservations over whether rape was a matter for the UN Security Council. In the end the vote was unanimous.

Two years ago I traveled to the town of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo's war-scarred east. Once this town was the summer playground of the Congolese elite and their Belgian colonisers. It sits on the southern edge of Lake Kivu, nestled under steep, rugged and now deforested hills. Dilipadated boat-houses and diving platforms line the lake shore. In this volatile region Bukavu is now relatively peaceful but it hasn't always been. It is not difficult to find women with tales of untold horrors.

Honorata Zakumwilo was 54 years old when I met her. She looked at me through squinted eyes. All her front teeth were missing or broken and blackened - the result of endless beatings. Her story is horrendous. What is worse, she is just one of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of women in the DRC alone to have suffered such an ordeal. Here are excerpts of her interview.

"In October 2001 the Interehamwe came to our village at 4am. They were dressed in military fatigues and heavily armed and they encircled the huts we were sleeping in. They killed many men and took about a dozen women with them. I was one of them.

"We walked for many hours until finally we arrived at a camp in the forest. The rape began immediately. Four men would hold a woman down be her hands and feet while a fifth would enter her. One by one they all had their turn. Sometimes they would chose a woman and hang her upside down from a wooden cross so that her head almost touched the ground. Up to twenty would rape her at a time. Everyone joined in.

"In the forest we were worth less than wild animals, less than objects. They would cry out 'A manger' [dinner time] but they weren't calling for food, they were calling for us".

It was fourteen months before Honorata summoned up the courage to escape her captors.

I am not sure the UN classifying rape as a weapon of war will changing anything. Automatic rifles, RPGs, land-mines all kill, mutilate and destroy the social fabric of communities....that is why they are used. An updated UN handbook will not end the rape of women caught up in wars. But at least it affords some recognition to the atrocities they endure.

Troubled Times in Virunga

These are troubled times in the Virunga National Park that straddles the Congolese/Rwandan border. In the last two weeks militias fighting in the war-scarred east of the Democratic Republic of Congo have slaughtered 14 elephants for their tusks. Conservationists say there is a global increase in the demand for ivory. The evidence points to China as the key culprit. According to Newsweek in March this year, ivory is the most commonly trafficked contraband. The US State Department puts the market value of ivory at $400 a pound…a lucrative source of cash for the militia.

But the rebel groups are not just trading in the tusks for cash. These details come the same week that the BBC said it had further evidence that UN peacekeepers in eastern DRC traded ammunition with local militias in return for ivory and gold. The BBC first made similar allegations a year ago. At the time a UN investigation found some evidence of smuggling but refuted the allegations of exchanges involving arms.

The BBC’s report carried details of a rendez-vous between a Rwandan rebel group whose senior commanders were leading architects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and Indian blue-helmets. The peacekeepers the Beeb says flew an UN-marked helicopter deep into Virunga where the ivory exchange allegedly took place.

The BBC’s evidence of a UN cover-up heaps shame on the peacekeepers and threatens to overshadow the small measure of stability the 17,000-strong force has brought to this volatile region. More tragic perhaps is the apparent arrogance among the powers-that-be within the UN that the institution’s name and reputation too precious to risk an honest investigation…let alone help protect Virunga’s threatened animal populations.

Arguably it is the mountain gorilla population that is most vulnerable. Wildlife Direct says that in the last 12 months eleven of these rare great apes have been butchered. Virunga National Park and the surrounding mountainous rainforest are home to half of the 700 remaining mountain gorillas worldwide. But they live a perilous existence, caught in the crossfire.